Brian Thill
@brianthill.bsky.social
Author, WASTE (Bloomsbury) | PhD from UCI | Writer @ The Atlantic, Guardian, Salon &c. | Just finished a novel; now writing a better one
post a famous bathroom scene
November 26, 2025 at 1:31 AM
post a famous bathroom scene
cannot recommend highly enough the recent issue of @bostonreview.bsky.social on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Filled with wonderful and urgent work, but I’m particularly drawn to the interview with Cathy J. Cohen: page after page of clear-sighted wisdom.
November 19, 2025 at 4:54 PM
cannot recommend highly enough the recent issue of @bostonreview.bsky.social on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Filled with wonderful and urgent work, but I’m particularly drawn to the interview with Cathy J. Cohen: page after page of clear-sighted wisdom.
Book rec #74: THE GOLDEN STATE, by @lydiakiesling.bsky.social. One of the best novels I’ve read about motherhood; a primer on US anti-immigrant fervor and homespun authoritarianism; and the truest depiction yet of the real California of my youth: dust, God, poverty, reactionaries, and rural despair.
September 10, 2025 at 12:06 AM
Book rec #74: THE GOLDEN STATE, by @lydiakiesling.bsky.social. One of the best novels I’ve read about motherhood; a primer on US anti-immigrant fervor and homespun authoritarianism; and the truest depiction yet of the real California of my youth: dust, God, poverty, reactionaries, and rural despair.
Book rec #73: BABEL, by @rfkuang.bsky.social. What starts as a historical dark-academia fantasy slowly morphs into an ornate exploration of the relationships between language and empire; the global costs of colonial power; and the eternal debates over the forms that workers’ resistance should take.
August 27, 2025 at 8:31 PM
Book rec #73: BABEL, by @rfkuang.bsky.social. What starts as a historical dark-academia fantasy slowly morphs into an ornate exploration of the relationships between language and empire; the global costs of colonial power; and the eternal debates over the forms that workers’ resistance should take.
Book rec #72: LOSE YOUR MOTHER, by Saidiya Hartman. A bracing journey to Ghana in search of the vestiges of ancestral slavery; a meditation on how the present doesn’t obliterate the past but often overwhelms it; a conscious and desperate act of resurrection of vanished ghosts and forgotten lives.
August 21, 2025 at 10:01 PM
Book rec #72: LOSE YOUR MOTHER, by Saidiya Hartman. A bracing journey to Ghana in search of the vestiges of ancestral slavery; a meditation on how the present doesn’t obliterate the past but often overwhelms it; a conscious and desperate act of resurrection of vanished ghosts and forgotten lives.
Book rec #70-71: TEHANU and THE OTHER WIND, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin returns us to Earthsea, writing two novels that deepen and enrich the trilogy, with even greater sharpness of prose and greater political and social nuance and subtlety. In place of its great heroes? Two remarkable heroines
July 15, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Book rec #70-71: TEHANU and THE OTHER WIND, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin returns us to Earthsea, writing two novels that deepen and enrich the trilogy, with even greater sharpness of prose and greater political and social nuance and subtlety. In place of its great heroes? Two remarkable heroines
Right.
Book rec #69: TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, by Jack Vance. Of all writers of the dying-earth subgenre, Vance somehow managed to blend apocalyptic millennial eschatological angst with lyrical wit, verve, joy, and whimsy; like a cross between Pratchett, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe, somehow.
Book rec #69: TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, by Jack Vance. Of all writers of the dying-earth subgenre, Vance somehow managed to blend apocalyptic millennial eschatological angst with lyrical wit, verve, joy, and whimsy; like a cross between Pratchett, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe, somehow.
June 18, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Right.
Book rec #69: TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, by Jack Vance. Of all writers of the dying-earth subgenre, Vance somehow managed to blend apocalyptic millennial eschatological angst with lyrical wit, verve, joy, and whimsy; like a cross between Pratchett, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe, somehow.
Book rec #69: TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, by Jack Vance. Of all writers of the dying-earth subgenre, Vance somehow managed to blend apocalyptic millennial eschatological angst with lyrical wit, verve, joy, and whimsy; like a cross between Pratchett, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe, somehow.
Book rec #68: WORLD LIGHT, by Halldór Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson. In a time of immiseration and upheaval in Iceland, a destitute lad (ill-equipped to face the burdens of life, labor, or society) struggles to hold on to his grandiose dream of becoming a great poet. A glorious novel.
June 11, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Book rec #68: WORLD LIGHT, by Halldór Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson. In a time of immiseration and upheaval in Iceland, a destitute lad (ill-equipped to face the burdens of life, labor, or society) struggles to hold on to his grandiose dream of becoming a great poet. A glorious novel.
Book rec #67: THE FIRE NEXT TIME, by James Baldwin. A direct, clear-sighted, scorching indictment of white America’s longstanding unwillingness to face the truth of itself; an investigation of the lies and delusions that continually keep true love and liberation at bay, generation after generation.
June 10, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Book rec #67: THE FIRE NEXT TIME, by James Baldwin. A direct, clear-sighted, scorching indictment of white America’s longstanding unwillingness to face the truth of itself; an investigation of the lies and delusions that continually keep true love and liberation at bay, generation after generation.
Book rec #66: THE GOLDEN AGE, by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland). A man visits an island whose inhabitants are rewriting the relationship between reality and fiction, between individual lives and the collective “Book” of life, an eruption of uncontainable literature, history, and memory.
June 9, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Book rec #66: THE GOLDEN AGE, by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland). A man visits an island whose inhabitants are rewriting the relationship between reality and fiction, between individual lives and the collective “Book” of life, an eruption of uncontainable literature, history, and memory.
Book rec #65: READER’S BLOCK, another gem by David Markson. A devastating novel about aging, mortality, art, memory, and loneliness, disguised as a hyper-intellectual commonplace book. In its way, as moving and profound a book as WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS.
May 31, 2025 at 8:02 PM
Book rec #65: READER’S BLOCK, another gem by David Markson. A devastating novel about aging, mortality, art, memory, and loneliness, disguised as a hyper-intellectual commonplace book. In its way, as moving and profound a book as WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS.
