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Benedict Sangster

@benedictsangster.bsky.social
300 followers 291 following 311 posts

Writer, Norwich, UK. Lover of all animals. Books and nothing else benedictsangster.com

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Reposted by Benedict Sangster
Jude Hopkins @heyjudenotjudy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
When looking in my doorstopper Victorian Lit text ("The Victorian Age," eds. Bowyer & Brooks) from back in the college days, I think of all the words within that few will read again. I always loved this poem by Robert Bridges. ("Triolet" - a poem of 8 lines w/only 2 rhymes).
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
'Of course he was a clever young man, but how clever, that was the question. Clever enough to recognize the truth when he heard it? Hardly anybody was clever enough for that.' Jean Rhys - Quartet
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Erratum Press @erratumpress.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
SCHOPENHAUER by Nathan Knapp *out today* order here >> www.erratumpress.com/schopenhauer
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Some new acquisitions from a trip to Nottingham and the Lake District
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

Offenses - Constance Debré, tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Dubliners - James Joyce

Quartet - Jean Rhys
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Fitzcarraldo Editions @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, publishes tomorrow. Head to the link below to pre-order a copy and read an excerpt from the book. fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/primev...
fitzcarraldoeditions.com
Primeval and Other Times | Fitzcarraldo Editions
For the denizens of mythical Primeval, its fields and forests bounded by two rivers, the world beyond is nothing more than a dream. Yet their stories – or Times – are a microcosm of the tumultuous rec...
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Ansgar Allen @ansgarallen.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
A short interview on Erratum Press, its Academic Division, and some of the motives behind the press. Thanks to Caroline Ball and the Open Book Collective. obc.copim.pub/odd-books-an... @openbookcollective.bsky.social
obc.copim.pub
Odd books, and the work of keeping them alive: in conversation with Ansgar Allen of Erratum Press
We sat down with Erratum Press founder, Ansgar Allen, to talk about defiant publishing, the state of the university, and why open access is anything but the easy option.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
'Through the nights of five years their campfires threw red light on the lava cliffs and touched the moving river with the mystery of transitoriness [...]' Wallace Stegner - Angle of Repose
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
'It's a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.' James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk
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Tree House Second-hand Bookshop @treehousebookshop.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
It's getting towards the end of the month, and it would be wonderful to sell 10 of these packages - any option - to help ensure we can pay all the bills and wages. Books in the post - surprise packages - what's not to love?! #BookSky www.treehousebookshop.co.uk/shop
treehousebookshop.co.uk
Shop
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
'How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!' Jane Austen - Persuasion
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
'But true passions are egocentric.' Stendhal - The Red and the Black, tr. Roger Gard
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Emma Devlin @theactualemma.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Very excited to present UNDERTOW. This will be a showcase of new and emerging writers of weird and wonderful fiction. If you'd like to take part, please click here: www.seamusheaneycentre.com/news/Callfor...
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@Galleybeggars @galleybeggars.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
It’s publication day for this beautiful book. Congratulations @markabowles.bsky.social
How Do People Stay the Same by Mark Bowles looking pretty damn stunning. Just wait until you read it though!
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Mark Bowles @markabowles.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
I've begun a big new novel (working title: Sligeach)—Yeats, Sligo, Irish history, folklore, and bodily decrepitude. To help fund the research, I'm offering redeemable creative writing vouchers (no expiry date, and they can be gifted). If you'd like to support, just send me a message. Thank you.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
'[...] a handful of stars lying, like glittering pebbles, on the black level of the night.' ~ The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
The fire crackled musically. From it swelled light smoke. Overhead the foliage moved softly. The leaves, with their faces turned toward the blaze, were coloured shifting hues of silver, often edged with red. Far off to the right, through a window in the forest, could be seen a handful of stars lying, like glittering pebbles, on the black level of the night.

excerpted from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
From Simina Banu's 'I will get up off of', irreverent and insightful, a contemporary poetry collection alert to the making of art in the modern world
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
'And all they did was look, no question, No answer, neither frown nor smile, no move Of lip or eye or brow or eyelid pale But all one long look which consumed his soul Into desire beyond the reach of hope' ~ A. S. Byatt - The Fairy Melusine, from Possession
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
'[...] the fact, to put it crudely, that there are sad children and happy children, said Korin, that he was a sad little child, one of those who throughout his life is slowly, steadily consumed by sadness [...]' ~ László Krasznahorkai - War and War, tr. George Szirtes
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
'Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.' From the long denouement of George Saunders' profound and very moving treatment of the death of Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie, Lincoln in the Bardo
We must try to see one another in this way
roger bevins iii

As suffering, limited beings-
hans vollman

Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.
roger bevins iii

From Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
'[...] grandmothers, tolerant and frank, recipients of certain dark secrets, who, by the quality of their unjudging listening, granted tacit forgiveness, and thus let in the sun.' ~ George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
'When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind [...], in every state that we imagine ourselves in.' ~ Thomas Bernhard - Walking, tr. Kenneth J. Northcott
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
'Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.' In awe of the exquisite arrangement of this paragraph from Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie; a paragraph, like the novel itself, containing multitudes
'And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie's face begin to soften and change? - did Evie's hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent? - and weren't those Evie's fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny's temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline? - and did Evie say or did she not; 'Now you, f'r instance: you're cute'? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.'

~ Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
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The Booker Prizes @thebookerprizes.com · 19/05/2026
‘It’s a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel’ We're delighted to announce the winner of the #InternationalBooker2026, supported by Bukhman Philanthropies, is Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King. Discover the book: thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
'What is the wind, what is it.' ~ Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
'[...] - the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colourless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future.' ~ Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
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David Hayden @seventydys.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
remember the pleasure Frank O’Hara, ‘Lines to a Depressed Friend’
LINES TO A DEPRESSED FRIEND
Joyous you should be,
of all things sweet the most constant and most pure, eager for what might be obtained—
Luck and life and hideous certainty preventing, ease and certainty inclining to neglect, so that real world, blue in the eye! this umber sky about us drowns. And where emptiness appears bounding along, of
unrest the most diligent athlete and keenest mate, remember the pleasure, even there, your beauty affords.
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Conduit Books @conduitbooks.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Wishing @smwwriting.bsky.social a happy publication day for MALC’S BOY! A bold, irreverent, funny, intellectually nimble debut novel exploring fathers and sons, northern working-class culture and masculinity. It’s our launch title & a novel like no other. From all good bookshops as of today 23.4.26
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Hesperus Press @hesperus.press · 21/04/2026
Born #OTD
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
'[...] one universe, one cosmos: contained in one America: one towering frantic edifice poised like a card-house over the abyss of the mortgaged generations [...]' ~ William Faulkner - Requiem for a Nun
and The Wilderness; one universe, one cosmos: contained in one America: one towering frantic edifice poised like a card-house over the abyss of the mortgaged generations; one boom, one peace: one swirling rocket-roar filling the glittering zenith as with golden feathers, until the vast hollow sphere of his air, the vast and terrible burden beneath which he tries to stand erect and lift his battered and indomitable head - the very substance in which he lives and, lacking which, he would vanish in a matter of seconds - is murmurous with his fear and terrors and disclaimers and repudiations and his aspirations and dreams and baseless hopes, bouncing back at him in radar waves from the constellations;
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Very excited to receive my copy of Malc's Boy by Shaun Wilson. Timely themes in a raw, experimental literary form - sign me up. Out now from @conduitbooks.bsky.social
The novel Malc's Boy by Shaun Wilson, depicting the legs and left trainer of a young man sitting, hands on knees, ambiguous.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Lines excerpted from Thomas Hardy's The Convergence of the Twain, his poem on the loss of the Titanic
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Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
'It is obviously a plot to weaken the holy name of Mother. That is why Mother murmurs a prayer to Jesus; the prayer is heard by no one, including the addressee.' ~ Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher, tr. Joachim Neugroschel
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
'[...] so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.' The beautiful closing line of So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW

[...] mother were able to look at each other without embarrassment. Whether he had as lonely a time as I did when he first moved to Chicago. And whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson - whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
'In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.' ~ William Maxwell - So Long, See You Tomorrow
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
GAUNT: O, but they say the tongues of dying men Inforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. ~ King Richard II - Shakespeare
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
'You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.' David Foster Wallace on taking your own life.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Excerpted from and oft-repeated in service of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Excited to receive this morning's bookpost: @niamhmaccabe.bsky.social's new collection Four Night Seas, of which I have read the first story and found it by turns cerebral, poetical, technological, elegiac, and also very funny. Out now from @lilliputpress.bsky.social
Four Night Seas, the collection of stories by Niamh Mac Cabe, featuring a cover of disembodied horizons, waves, and greyhounds, beside two daffodils, bought unbloomed.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
'The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful.' ~ Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Vanity of Existence, tr. R.J. Hollingdale
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Recent acquisitions from a trip to the nothing short of inspirational Hay-on-Wye, the National Book Town of Wales, which well befits its title. (Full list & translators in alt-text) #booksky
A stack of books from a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a mood-inspiriting candle perilously close beside it threatening wholesale conflagration, all against a backdrop of dead succulents.

From top to bottom:

Requiem for a Nun - William Faulkner
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman, tr. Ros Schwartz
War and War - László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes
The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek, tr. Joachim Neugroschel
Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster
King Richard II - William Shakespeare
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Salò Press @salopress.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
As a tiny independent DIY press we have zero funding, we'll likely never be on an awards list, but we are passionate about what we do, and paying writers. We pay our writers 50% of profits. Every sale matters more than you know. Thank you for the continued support 💜 www.salopress.com
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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
J. H. Prynne, on reading
When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
'Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person [...] and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.' ~ Julia Armfield - Our Wives Under the Sea
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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 02/03/2026
The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
A horrifying vision of the future
koreatimes.co.kr
1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves - The Korea Times
For generations, Koreans have regarded books as the most reliable form of information. They're slower than social media, but more carefully made an...
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
'retreat and steps back are not the same' Ross Scott-Buccleuch's Harm Dissuasive, taken from the fragmentary and yet playful collection Fang Coda, via @salopress.bsky.social
eager for unweaving
or merest harm dissuasive

retreat and steps back
are not the same

Excerpted from Ross Scott-Buccleuch's Harm Dissuasive, in the collection Fang Coda from Salò Press.
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@Galleybeggars @galleybeggars.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE: A quick announcement and apologies - we'll be posting the GBP Short Story Prize longlist at 17:00 tonight; it would have been much earlier but alas, an IT meltdown has scuppered that... (Working on it now!) (Please share if you can.)
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Erratum Press @erratumpress.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
An Absence of Sea by Christina Tudor-Sideri | *out 16 April* www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o...
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Benedict Sangster @benedictsangster.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Some of Infinite Jest's almost-proverbs from the first of its great, deeply human Alcoholics Anonymous/Ennet House/recovery sections. A selection of my favourites, very particularly the last two
That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do.

That loneliness is not a function of solitude.

That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room.

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever.

Excerpted without context and out of order from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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