Trevor Berrett
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mookse.bsky.social
Trevor Berrett
@mookse.bsky.social
2.2K followers 770 following 950 posts
Books and Film | The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast with @bibliopaul.bsky.social | 2017 Best Translated Book Award Judge
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mookse.bsky.social
Our first snow of the season!
Snow falling on our crabapple berries.
November 30, 2025 at 10:40 PM
mookse.bsky.social
We are excited to have in hand Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami—Early Shorts and Features! Soon @peutetre.bsky.social and I will be recording a new episode of The Eclipse Viewer! So thrilled @criterion.bsky.social is relaunching this series, and this is a particularly lovely set!
David Blakeslee holding up his copy of Eclipse Series 47 Me holding up my copy of Eclipse Series 47
November 12, 2025 at 10:23 PM
mookse.bsky.social
This weekend, I started Time Regained, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s become a part of every day. I’m going to miss it when it’s done, so I’m going to be sure to savor my time with this last volume.
My side table, with the final volume of In Search of Lost Time on top.
November 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
mookse.bsky.social
What I'm currently reading: The Vanishing Man, by Laura Cumming. When in London recently, I bought this at the National Gallery. I’ve been wanting it since @john-self.bsky.social and @jacquiwine.bsky.social recommended it. Wonderfully written and just what I'm wanting on these early November nights.
Holding up my copy of Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man.
November 6, 2025 at 3:19 AM
mookse.bsky.social
Library book club night! We’re discussing The Scarlet Letter. I first read it thirty years ago, as a junior in high school. I’ve wanted to reread it for years since I remembered very little other than the main elements. Excited to discuss it with others!
The Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Scarlet Letter
October 30, 2025 at 12:06 AM
mookse.bsky.social
Back in 2016, I picked up the first batch of Anita Brookner reprints that Penguin UK released—a stack I’ve loved seeing on my shelf ever since.

This weekend, while book shopping around London, I finally found the second batch — the ones I’d missed, covering most of her 1990s novels.
Photo of the spines of my newest additions to my Brookner paperback collection with matching Penguin design. The books are Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, and Visitors. Photo of the covers of my newest additions to my Brookner paperback collection with matching Penguin design. The books are Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, and Visitors. Photos of my original haul of Penguin UK Anita Brookner reprints from 2016. The first shows the covers of A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Family and Friends, Latecomers, Lewis Percy, Falling Slowly, Undue Influence, The Bay of Angels, The Next Big Thing, and Strangers. The second shows the same with their nice white spines out.
October 19, 2025 at 9:49 AM
mookse.bsky.social
We start our readalong of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on Sunday. Come join in! discord.gg/5KZRYqVf2U
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
October 3, 2025 at 5:39 PM
mookse.bsky.social
I finished The Captive this morning! Now on to The Fugitive…
Photo of my Modern Library edition of The Captive and The Fugitive
October 3, 2025 at 2:05 PM
mookse.bsky.social
I had the opportunity of previewing Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (tr. by Max Lawton) in an eArc, but I did not expect the physical book to be this massive! As part of what I hope to be a long relationship with this book, I’m excited to transfer my notes! @deepvellum.bsky.social this is amazing!
Holding up the massive physical release of Deep Vellum’s edition of Schattenfroh My ereader and the physical copy of Schattenfroh open to the same page with my marginalia.
August 26, 2025 at 1:09 AM
mookse.bsky.social
l finished Daniel Deronda—and with it, my journey through all of George Eliot's novels. Since January 2024, I've been reading them chronologically. Each book has felt like stepping into a world at once brimming with intellect and alive with feeling. An appreciation: www.instagram.com/p/DNjvL8QAH5...
My Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda
August 20, 2025 at 1:07 PM
mookse.bsky.social
🕊️ NYRB Classics is bringing Barbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died back into print on September 16, and I couldn’t be happier. Pym finally joins the NYRB Classics list! Here’s hoping this is just the start of more Pym to come. @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social
NYRB Classics edition of The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym Back of the book: "Barbara Pym... guards against sentimentality. She is the writer who points out 'the desire to do good without much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us,' the regrettable things said between friends and 'the satisfaction which is to be got from saying precisely things of that kind,' the irritation we feel 'when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they perform a kind action.' But towards her characters she shows a creator's charity. She understands them so well that the least she can do is to forgive them." -PENELOPE FITZGERALD The Sweet Dove Died is one of Barbara Pym's last novels, in which her work took on a new, keen edge. It is about a woman's attachment to a man much younger than herself. Beautiful and self-absorbed, Leonora Eyre has a passion for collecting Victorian objects and is coolly indifferent toward everything outside of her fastidious, elegant existence. When she is courted by Humphrey, a widowed antiques dealer, she disdains his advances, preferring rather the attentions of his twenty-four-year-old nephew, James. Leonora's possession of James is challenged, how-ever, first by Phoebe, a bookish young woman his own age, and then by the suave and seductive Ned, a visiting American professor with whom James quickly becomes infatuated. Pym's sharp eye for comedy and shrewd observation of English manners are on full display in this finely wrought novel of love, loss, and all the hopes and disappointments that befall the human heart. "Barbara Pym's late novels have... a considerable darkness within them, [which) in fact has its own continuity with what is romantic, what is golden, in the first and happier comedies." -BARBARA EVERETT, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
August 16, 2025 at 7:59 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Just finished Sodom and Gomorrah! Onward to The Captive and The Fugitive (Volumes 5 & 6 of In Search of Lost Time). These titles—and our narrator’s outlook on love—have me a little nervous…
My side table, showing two books: The Modern Library edition of The Captive & The Fugitive sits on top of Sodom and Gomorrah. Also on the table, a hot drink with some froth, a table puzzle, and a house plant.
August 16, 2025 at 3:51 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Just finished Sodom and Gomorrah! Onward to The Captive and The Fugitive (Volumes 5 & 6 of In Search of Lost Time). These titles—and our narrator’s outlook on love—have me a little nervous…
My side table, showing two books: The Modern Library edition of The Captive & The Fugitive sits on top of Sodom and Gomorrah. Also on the table, a hot drink with some froth, a table puzzle, and a house plant.
August 16, 2025 at 3:50 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Just got the gorgeous NYRB Classics centenary edition of Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Edward Mendelson! First-edition text with Woolf’s own revisions, and a cover that nods to the original Hogarth Press design. Centennial editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves are on the way…in a few years.
Holding up the new NYRB Classics edition of Mrs. Dalloway A book stack featuring The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, Mark Hussey’s Mrs. Dalloway: Biography of a Novel, my well-loved old edition, and—coming soon from Columbia University Press—Edward Mendelson’s The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway. On top is the new NYRB Classics edition.
August 10, 2025 at 2:02 AM
mookse.bsky.social
It looks like @peutetre.bsky.social and I are back in business! Long the last Eclipse Viewer episode was back in 2017, but I still feel fresh and excited! www.criterion.com/current/post...
An image from The Criterion Collection featuring their upcoming release of Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts and Features.
August 6, 2025 at 5:08 PM
mookse.bsky.social
D.M. Black won the 2022 National Translation Award for Poetry for his translation of Purgatorio. Coming soon from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social is his new translation of Paradiso. I loved his work for Purgatorio, so I’m very excited to dive into Paradiso!
Holding the new NYRB Classics edition of Paradiso in front of their 2022 edition of Purgatorio, each translated by DM Black.
July 18, 2025 at 1:18 AM
mookse.bsky.social
It was after midnight last night when I thought I’d just read the first page of Chilco. Just a peek, I said. Just the first page. About an hour later, I finally forced myself to put it down. I’m loving it. Chilco, by Daniela Catrileo, tr Jacob Edelstein. Out from @charcopress.com.
Cover of the Charco Press edition of Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco, translated by Jacob Edelstein First page of Chilco The Echo of Mould In this house moisture overwhelms everything. I feel like its scent is devouring me. Every room is saturated with a dense smell, a smell like confinement. I light incense, palo santo, put orange peels in the corners. I have bowls filled with Agua Florida and patchouli. I spray the sheets and curtains with cheap perfume. I smear lemon verbena, lavender, rosemary oils on my skin. I rub lemon peels on my arms, on my elbows. And nothing, I get nothing. I open the windows, and the mantle of the Pacific saturates the landscape. I open the windows to let the fresh air in, to let the breeze penetrate the spaces between my ribs and take the opportunity to cleanse me from within. Sounds erupt from the outside: seagulls crying, horses neighing, and waves crashing wildly against the cliffs. The dog's howling is drowned out by ship horns. For those who live in a big city, these noises might seem like evidence of stillness. Silence, for some, is synonymous with human absence, by which they refer, especially, to the lack of articulated words, the silence of tongues. But on this piece of land, every murmur forms part of an instrument. Here, every whisper unfolds into a complex
July 12, 2025 at 6:26 PM
mookse.bsky.social
You betcha. The first page (though a bit intimidating to me due to the straight block of text!) makes me feel like this is a journey I’ve been craving!
First page of Bomarzo: 1. THE HOROSCOPE Niccolò Orsinis astrologer - My family-The hunchback—The imposed female masquerade—The skeleton— My father and Michelangelo's Da-vid—Etruscan Bomarzo—A meeting with Benvenuto Cellini—Exile to Florence-The two pages SANDRO Benedetto, physician and astrologer to my kinsman, the illustrious Niccolò Orsini, a condottiere who after his death was compared to the heroes of the Iliad, cast my horoscope on March 6, 1512, the day on which I was born, at two o'clock in the morning, in Rome. Thirty-seven years before, on the same March 6, but in 1475, also at two o'clock in the morning, Michelangelo Buonarroti saw the uncertain light of the world for the first time in an Etruscan village. The coincidence was nothing but a fortuitous accident of hour and date. In truth, the stars that presided over our respective appearances on life's chessboard had arranged their players for quite different matches. When Buonarroti was born, Mercury and Venus were in the ascendant, triumphant, naked, facing the throne of Jupiter. It was the dance of heaven, the mythological contradance that welcomes creators who touch divinity. Glory awaited the person who first opened his eyes underneath that splendor which transformed the firmament into a brightly lit salon, all candelabra, with the god floating among them in the transparent glow of the atmosphere, stately and dignified. When I was born, however, Sandro Benedetto pointed out important contradictions in the cartography of my existence. It is true that the Sun, in the sign of water and strengthened by my good position in respect to the Moon, conferred upon me occult powers and a vision of the beyond along with a vocation for astrology and metaphysics. It is true that Mars, the basic ruler, and Venus, the occasional one of House VIII,
July 12, 2025 at 6:12 PM
mookse.bsky.social
I didn’t know it was so long, but I’ve been so excited to get and read Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, tr. by Gregory Rabassa and coming from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. Is anyone else looking to dig in?
Photo of the new NYRB Classics edition of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo Photo of the back of the new NYRB Classics edition of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo: Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa "Bomarzo is a novel that will make any reader happy..... It's a novel about art and a novel about decadence, about the luxury of writing novels and about the exquisite uselessness of the novel.... And of course it's also a novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around." - ROBERTO BOLAÑO Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez-one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century-re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini-who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita-looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life. Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immerSive story told in a sumptuous style-like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust-as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys. "When the true history of our literature-and not an apology for it-comes to be written, Manuel Mujica Lainez will at last be seen as a benefactor. He brings back to contemporary writing the sense of destiny, of adventure with its hopes and fears, the tradition of Stevenson, Hugo, and-why not?-Ariosto.... An attentive reader of the great Russians and of Henry James, he gives us that special delight of intimate portraiture, of watching the gradual unfolding of personality." -JORGE LUIS BORGES The table of contents: CONTENTS Introduction • vii 1. The Horoscope • 7 2. The Uncertainties of Love • 84 3. The Appearance of Magic • 171 4. Giulia Farnese • 225 5. The Duke of the Cats • 281 6. The Portrait by Lorenzo Lotto • 321 7. A Wedding in Bomarzo • 358 8. Orazio Orsini • 425 9. The Accursed War • 502 10. The Sacred Wood of the Monsters • 563 11. My Lepanto • 623
July 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
mookse.bsky.social
The exploration of high society in The Guermantes Way was pretty tough at times, but ultimately my appreciation for Proust’s world deepened. I’m excited to continue unraveling the psychological and social dynamics, and I can’t wait to dive into the shifting landscapes Proust has yet to reveal!
Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
June 15, 2025 at 3:07 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Saturday mornings with Proust. We are nearing the end of The Guermantes Way!
Proust on the side table. The Guermantes Way next to a warm drink.
May 31, 2025 at 2:41 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Anyone want to hold my hand while I slowly read this? It looks amazing and difficult (in a good way). Out today from @coffeehousepress.bsky.social: Rachel Blau Duplesis’s The Complete Drafts.
Rachel Blau Duplesis: The Complete Drafts box set, a shot of the book spines in the box set. Rachel Blau Duplesis: The Complete Drafts box set, a look at the spine of the box set. Rachel Blau Duplesis: The Complete Drafts box set, with the two books out on a table. Rachel Blau Duplesis: The Complete Drafts box set, a snapshot of the first bit of the table of contents.
May 21, 2025 at 12:49 AM
mookse.bsky.social
Here are the three big books that are in my current daily reading routine. Or, at least, will be once I start Daniel Deronda today!
A book stack featuring Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot; The Prime Minister, by Anthony Trollope; and The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust.
May 18, 2025 at 3:28 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Happy publication day! I’ve heard such good things about this from @stuckinabook.bsky.social, and here is a brand new edition from Union Square & Co. with an intro by Elisa Gabbert! I’m going to start reading…right now!
One Fine Day, by Millie Panter-Downs
May 6, 2025 at 11:15 PM
mookse.bsky.social
Huge congratulations to Percival Everett! On Instagram, Merve Emre posted a sobering reflection on the state of American publishing. Taking that as a prompt, I’m planning to dive into the other three finalists. Here’s to exploring new books and engaging with the diverse voices.
Me with Percival Everett smiling as he signs my copy of James. FINALISTS FOR FICTION •Headshot: A Novel by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking) •James by Percival Everett (Doubleday) •Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine (Verse Chorus Press) •The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press)
May 5, 2025 at 8:15 PM