iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I’ve started the Mieville: the idea is good, its description as ‘monumental’ addresses the page count, it’s soooo looooong windeeeeeeeead! Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo is the outsider I’d like to see win. CM doesn’t need it. Should the rest even be in the race? www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

newstatesman.com

The Goldsmiths Prize 2026 shortlist announced

This year’s six-person shortlist for the £10,000 award for fiction that “breaks the mould” is led by established writers from the speculative fiction genres.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

I don’t carry a torch for Shriver - the darker the place she is condemned to, the better - but her Spectator column does ask some of the right questions. Which are better considered through the exemplary AI-collaborative indie writing practice of Joanna Walsh (e.g Autobiology, Mis-Communication).

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

TOOTHPULL was longlisted for the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction prize tonight - thanks to everyone who’s encouraged and helped AAAARGH press and myself over the last few years! open.substack.com/pub/therepub...

open.substack.com

The Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize 2026 longlist

The wait is over! Till the shortlist wait

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

for some reason Alfred Jarry crossed my mind when I saw Morland’s cartoon in today’s Times

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

a really impressive account of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s development politically and as a poet, the watershed of 1981 and the importance of John la Rose and New Beacon - though it really should have made more of Race Today, Railton Road, CLR James and Darcus Howe… but it’s a keeper of a piece

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

A seriously impressive review in the LRB which hasn’t sent me to the title, but headfirst back into the 73 hours of David Lynch’s ten movies and three series of Twin Peaks. I know Godard didn’t like him but Godard wasn’t always on point. The soundtracks are almost as good as JLG’s.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

My thoughts on the remarkable fiction of Paul Griffiths in the latest issue of Exacting Clam www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-18...

exactingclam.com

Paul Griffith's let me tell you and let me go on | Exacting Clam

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

No longer Manga and Murakami. Prospect surveys the boom in fiction translated from Japanese. I guess I should take a look at Murata

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Many thanks! to Rónán Hession for his appreciation of TOOTHPULL in the Irish Times this weekend

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

I can’t help but read the latest Maggie Nelson as a flipside to Toothpull, my recent memoir of a troubled dentist. Pathemata, dis-Latined, is a Book of Suffering. Death is in the air. It’s a COVID era narrative. “Pain pretends urgency” she says, “one has to become cold-hearted to its entreaties.”

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

as i think (in fact hope) you aren’t likely to be readers of the remote right monthly The Critic, here’s a kiss and tell feature you might otherwise miss - an author’s step by step account of the collapse of Unbound

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

I’m impressed and also disappointed that the centre right/FT appears to understand the contested and intricate links between literary form, imagination and politics better than the left.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Thank-you Will Davies for reviewing Toothpull of St Dunstan - the memoir of a Canterbury dentist tugging and plugging at the gate to the city for 700 years - in today’s Times Literary Supplement.

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David Henningham 郭大衛 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 💖💛💙 @henninghampress.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

A 700 year old dentist. This is a fantastic book. Ambitious idea, dazzling at the sentence level, entertaining in-between. If there's a type of novel you love that you think people "don't publish anymore," it's probably this one. For readers of #AlanMoore and #modernism. Let's call it Mooredernism

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

OutCalvino-ing Calvino in ‘89! This and The Lay of Sir Tristram - and the musicological expertise of Griffiths’ work on the Second Viennese and Darmstadt schools - are the seedbed for the revoiced Ophelias of LET ME TELL YOU and LET ME GO ON, now combined by NYRB. Republish the backlist, someone.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

“Literature is becoming culturally marginal”; “the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking”; its “prestige has declined precipitously.” This week’s New Statesman includes a lamentable Jeremiad by James Marriott, name-checking no writers after Trilling and Auden. Though he does have a point.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Philip Hensher self-puffs his forthcoming history of the novel in this week’s Spectator, trashing Eimear McBride as he goes. Not a volume I’ll be pre-ordering.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

TOOTHPULL OF ST DUNSTAN - The startling memoir of a dentist who for 700 years pulled teeth in the approach to Canterbury, beside its city gate. Your copy is ready at Aaaargh Press www.aaaarghpress.com/product/toot...

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

The pre-packaged sale of Unbound cancels the crowdfunder publisher’s many debts, replacing them with damage control pledges that no-one can rely on; tweaks the brand to Boundless; and leaves the trust and respect of users where? (The Times)

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

It’s rare I nod my head when reading Shriver

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Good company for spring, a brace of poets who never met, each war-wise and more (Pushkin Press). “You can paint with whatever you like, with pipes, with stamps, postcards or playing cards..” - “Ride forward humanity. Saddle the wild herd of sounds!”

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

FRIENDS IN LOVE AND WAR / L’ELOGE DES MEILLEURS ES ENNEMIE ES at the Ikon in Birmingham is a visual arts reset with Europe. The highlight is undoubtedly Rachel McLean’s video The Lion and the Unicorn (2012), a comic take on our disunited kingdom in the run up to Scotland’s independence referendum.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

frontispiece to Elfriede Jelinek THE CHILDREN OF THE DEAD (Yale UP) / can anyone help?

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Ian Duhig @ianduhig.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Nagg and Nell from Beckett's 'Endgame' when young

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Paris, November 2015 - the horror. A harrowing read. Stade de France, Belle Equipe, Petit Cambodge, Le Carillon, and Bataclan. Nine Islamists, one night, 130 murders. Hundreds maimed. Emmanuel Carrere on the victims, the killers, the responders, the trial. Hard to read, and necessary.

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Marcus Rediker @marcusrediker.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

The late Christopher Hill was central to my life and work. I look forward to reviewing this book for @thenation.com: *Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian* by Michael Braddick, to be published by @VersoBks in February 2025.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

I recommend Nell Dunn’s LIVING LIKE I DO as the follow-up read to Susanna Crossman’s candid and compelling memoir of childhood in a commune, HOME IS WHERE WE START. In the mid-70s Dunn visited a range of alternative households in which children thrived. I was a teenager in Chapter 9 Ramsgate.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 12/10/2024

Halfway through the Goldsmiths shortlist: Cusk ahead even though I’m only a few pages in (I’ve come late to her). Pawson a powerful read, daily life boiling over then losing intensity, heated by memories of the Congo, Iraq, Angola. Bowles an over-hyped faux-angry campus novel.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 31/08/2024

“Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices.” Caliban has found me at Faversham Hop Festival. www.shepherdneame.co.uk/hop-festival

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/08/2024

Sinclair’s psychogeographical writing is sometimes trite, frequently striking, often gnostic, highly influential. PARIAH GENIUS is a remarkable text about John Deakin, the lensman Bacon commissioned to shoot images of his hard drinking Soho courtiers. Sinclair raises the dead and it’s unnerving.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/07/2024

If the first poem, The Rollright Stones (they’re neolithic, and not far from chipping Norton) is anything to go by, then Minden’s latest collection, POPPY, will be well worth the effort: “the excavation of indefinite pasts in the spirit of presence.”

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 01/06/2024

far too close to everyday east London earnestness for comfort / Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis played as farce

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 11/05/2024

Diane Di Prima: “halfway around the world the bombs are falling… Do not think to correct this by reading.”

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

I rate Peter Brookes very highly but the use of Beckett in political cartoons inevitably mocks and caricatures the drama too

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 20/04/2024

Wonderfully paced narrative pivots and returns, moving where next, towards what? Bought on the strength of a passing comment made here by Jonathan Gibb I think…

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 16/03/2024

my weekend is making room for this new white spine - tho unlike the author, I’m won’t be walking as I read it

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Another of our Brechts leaves the stage

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Benjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.social · 21/02/2024

Oh, let's up the ante a little. Post four books you've read more than a half dozen times each.

the covers of Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman; The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson; The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken; and Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 15/02/2024

Kafka centenary events for 2024 www.kafka-research.ox.ac.uk

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 11/02/2024

We will fight them on the beaches. Whitstable, by the Old Neptune.

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 08/02/2024

“Maestro defaults too easily to the tortured artist stereotype, without any explanation of what exactly tortured him” ie which music write for his time. Philip Clark takes down the Bernstein biopic in the NYRB www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 06/01/2024

Adam Mars-Jones’ LRB review of COREY FAH DOES SOCIAL MOBILITY dismantles - impressively and with tact - the shakier runs of scaffolding from which Isabel Waidner builds the case for queer, subaltern and marginalised writing https:/www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/adam-mars-jones/camden-town-toreros

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kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 28/12/2023

My run of the sixties mag Anarchy, scanned by Tony Lyons of Estuary English for use with his graphic design students at Christ Church University in Canterbury. Way to go… www.instagram.com/reel/C1Zf-sx...

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