iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Happy Holidays! Every day until Christmas, I'll use this thread to rec a book to help you with your gift list. Let's start with THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN by Giorgio De Maria, translated by Ramon Glazov, and republished with a foreword by moi. Buy from your fav indie. (Alt text = more detail.) 1/?

Cover of Twenty Days of Turin, with text in white showing foreword by Jeff VanderMeer, author Giorgio De Maria, Translated by Ramon Glazov centered down the middle over black and white art Satan Sowing the Tare by Felicien Victor Joseph Rops, a Belgian artist of the late 1800s.

Description of the novel: In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared.

An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet―and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing―this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.

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Toto @toto7792.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Omgggg thank you so much for this thread!! I'm always curious for recs from my fav writers!

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Today's holiday rec is ART WORK by Sally Mann, a great collection of essays/memoir about creativity from one of our best photographers. With copious photos, images, and the great first lines "This is a book about how to get shit done. Or, more particularly, how I got it done. Or didn't." 2/?

photo in black and white of Mann at a table, working, with title On The Creative Life in black below and Art Work in black above next to Sally Mann in white. Against a biege background.

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Shari MacDonald Strong @sharimacd.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

This look amazing! Putting it on my list.

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josiejoor.bsky.social @josiejoor.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

im planning a bookstore into my day! TY

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Sean @videogremlin.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Love this book- I read it and Annihilation around the same time.

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Cameron McGrath @camgottaplan.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I live in Turin and read this while visiting the locations in the book, highly recommended!

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