iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Lisa Owens

Kelly Barnhill @kellybarnhill.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Friends, this piece by M. Gessen is a bracing, sobering read. We need to understand the era we are likely walking into. We have to ask ourselves what will be irrevokably lost. What are we willing to do to stop it? www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | To Obey Trump or Not to Obey (Gift Article)

The voluntarily surrender of the public’s power is how autocracies are built.

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

referring to all enemies henceforth as 'typos'

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

warning: this @theguyliner.bsky.social piece looks like it's going to be a bit of light relief, but in fact it's a stealth treatise on suffering and joy! theguyliner.com/impeccable/b...

[Screenshot of text that reads]: You will never have the perfect life, you will never meet the man of your dreams, you will never be able to retry the forks in the road that took you to darker places, but it doesn’t mean the past is 100% unchangeable and the future is 100% out of your control. The two timelines – what was then, and what’s to come – can work together in the smallest of ways to make the now a lot more bearable.

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

really delighted that my second novel, NATURAL DISASTER has found a home in the US with Little, Brown

Deal report from Publishers Marketplace: Author of NOT WORKING Lisa Owens's NATURAL DISASTER, unfolding across 24 hours, charting one woman's increasingly desperate attempts to spend a last, special day with her children before returning to the 'real world' of her office job, to Liese Mayer at Little, Brown, at auction, by David Forrer at Inkwell Management, on behalf of Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein.

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

The Year of the Snake: very inspiring for the worm community

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Just finished ‘Our Evenings’ by Alan Hollinghurst. A beautiful, elegiac book, so perceptive at times I found it almost painful (but also, because it’s Alan H, very funny and sharp too)

Photograph of the hardback of ‘Our Evenings’ by Alan Hollinghurst

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

I wrote this a couple of years ago for @stingingfly.bsky.social about the great solace I found (and continue to find) in Lydia Davis's work. Re-posting here in case anyone else needs some Lydia in their life.

I’ve admired Lydia Davis’s writing for many years, and keep a copy of her Collected Stories on my desk. She reminds me there are always new ways into things: her unexpected approaches turn the most mundane material into something complex and surprising. For a long time, though, her formal innovations and often dispassionate tone held me at a respectful distance. I considered her more a writer of the head than the heart.
Lately, while going through a difficult time, I found myself unable to read novels. Something about their scale or point of view kept emphasising how stuck I was in myself. Condemned instead to scrolling online, I came across Davis’s micro-story, ‘Head, Heart’. The first time I read it years ago, I’d been left a bit cold by its simplicity—it struck me as reductive and naive. But encountering it again from a place of crisis, I saw the story was in fact a tiny, precious gift: it perfectly understood the inevitability and ordinariness of sadness as well as its extraordinary intensity and reach.
I immediately returned to her other stories and was astonished to see myself everywhere: in a lost button, the girl who imagines a little man at night, the old woman whose house is falling down around her. It felt like magic that these words—which I’d already read!—were waiting there to come alive for me at just the right moment. One of Davis’s collections is called Varieties of Disturbance and I think this title gestures at what she does best: recognising that peace is a precarious state, but also that we are never truly alone in our disquiet.

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

perfect description of falling in love (from Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst)

Screenshot of text: ‘I went home on the Tube wrapped up among the five o’clock crowds in my own sensations, of a new chord that had sounded, and sounded again just as surely each time I found my way back to it. I felt entirely open to it, as a thing in itself, thrilling and unquestionable.’

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

all the Limes are (all the Limes are down) and the sky is grey

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Now that’s a BLURB (Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald which I have finally got around to reading thanks to @jessicastanley.co.uk)

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

just treated myself to a glass of the good stuff* * November-temperature tap water

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

‘There is a difference between “I’m frightened” and “this is frightening”. We get into trouble when we confuse the two’ — another great column from Eleanor Gordon-Smith, whose advice always somehow manages to transcend the particularity of the original problem www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

theguardian.com

‘My boyfriend’s Instagram searches tap into my insecurities. I’m scared I’ll never be his type. How do I proceed?’ | Leading questions

There is no relationship where neither party ever finds other people attractive, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But it is still legitimate to ask our partners to assuage our fears

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Reposted by Lisa Owens

Tiffany Watt Smith @tiffwattsmith.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Lisa, thank you SO much for posting about this - I'm half way through FAMILY HAPPINESS and...swoon. I'm officially a fan!

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

I loved writing the intro to the beautiful Weidenfeld & Nicolson reissue of Laurie Colwin’s FAMILY HAPPINESS, which is out this week alongside two other brilliant classics of hers. She was such a talented writer: sparkling, insightful, funny, profound.

A copy of a new edition of FAMILY HAPPINESS by Laurie Colwin, showing a woman with her head on her arm, leaning on a table

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

the last time I posted here (also the first time) was to share a story I had written. Surely — SURELY — no one would be so craven as to come crawling back a whole year later, only to announce their new novel. And yet… www.thebookseller.com/rights/virag...

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Lisa Owens @lamowens.bsky.social · 11/10/2023

joined Bluesky the same day I have a new story out... coincidence? (The story is called 'Ice Queen' and you can read it here: stingingfly.org/2023/10/11/i...)

stingingfly.org

Ice Queen – The Stinging Fly

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