iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A most succinct lesson on writing by the one and only Annie Dillard (1945-2026). GOAT.

Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Had I known Kurosawa’s High and Low was a masterclass in moral vertigo and social asymmetry, descending from an idyllic hilltop mansion, maneuvering through a limbo-like second act procedural and ending in a labyrinthine Hell, I would’ve watched it sooner. Cinema at its best. No notes.

Film poster of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Oh, nothing… Just 2 Bibles arrived today. Eva & Eve. Hesse & Babitz. Sublime & Outstanding.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Recent arrivals: the major novels of German author Wolfgang Koeppen, a late modernist known for a fragmented style heavy on shifting perspectives and stream-of-consciousness techniques. A few years ago I read Pigeons on the Grass (1951), a solid, early critique of social amnesia.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Next up: The Complete Fiction of David Foster Wallace, including the uncollected stories “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation to The Bad Thing,” “Other Math,” “Solomon Silverfish,” “Crash of 69,” “Order and Flux in Northampton,” segment of “The Flexicon” & “All That”.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Easter weekend purchases… Joy Williams has a new collection of short stories! Curious about the new Lerner all-male triangle of fatherhood and rivalry. My boy Kraszna’s acceptance speech. Mishima’s “gang of highly philosophical teenage boys.” Sampling Middlemarch’s prelude left me gasping for air.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

In a recent episode of the podcast The Mookse and the Gripes I referred to Hélène Bessette’s outstanding novel Lili is Crying (1953) as “Clarice Lispector on acid, Hilda Hilst on mushrooms, and Ann Quin on molly.” 👀 If you enjoy experimental literature, don’t miss this one.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

McNally Editions... Gotta catch ‘em all!

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

I upgraded my old copy of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (his best work, imo) with a signed one. A masterful novel about a single day in the life of a young Manhattanite billionaire riding in the back of a stretch limo on his way to get the perfect haircut. Outrageous and unrivaled.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Years ago, while dining with Michael Silverblatt, Orhan Pamuk came up as a topic. He said, “You know, I was supposed to have dinner with him tonight.” “Why didn’t you?” I asked. “I had already made plans with you,” he said. “You’re nuts!” I yelled. Dear Michael, I will miss you.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

So excited about this reading project. 2026 will be The Year of the Faustian Bargain for me and these are the books I’ll read, except my own novel (it’s in the picture because it features a Faustian bargain, a topic I’m passionate about and one I hope to revisit someday).

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Done with The Guermantes Way. Another jewel, although not as beautiful as volumes 1 and 2, but the 47 pages (425-471) in which the Narrator describes his grandmother falling ill and eventually passing contain some of the most beautiful and heartbreaking passages I’ve ever read.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I know I’m rather late to the Thomas De Quincey party, but I’ve arrived.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

“Stellar” doesn’t even begin to describe today’s book mail. Finally, John Cowper Powys is in my house. I know a new edition of A Glastonbury Romance is coming out fairly soon, but I couldn’t resist owning the one featuring Jan Provoost’s work on the cover.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

In January of 2024 I read Swann’s Way and since then I set out to read one volume of In Search of Lost Time every January, so it’s time for The Guermantes Way. While reading Proust I like to picture everything as if it belonged in an impressionist painting, which makes it even more beautiful.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

‘Tis the season of Norwegian arrivals. I’ve been told that Tarjei Vesaas only wrote masterpieces. Looking forward to reading his work in 2026.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Up next, the complete works of Fleur Jaeggy, whose succinct books can be read in a single seating, but linger in your mind with the resilience of a brain virus.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

A thing of beauty and the closest thing to a miracle: when a poet decides to write a novel. This 568-page brick collects essays about novels or “novelistic attempts” written by such creatures. I’ve been dipping in and out of it and I’m absolutely fascinated by the topic.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

A 20 years in the making translation has reached my front door. Peter Weiss’ magnum opus has been criticized for being “plotless,” “nonsensical,” and for featuring “unpsychological [?],” characters (everything I want in a novel!). W.G. Sebald admired it. That’s good enough for me.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Up next: the dramatic works of Jean Genet.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

This novel is wild. Don’t be misled by the title. Haven’t read much Mailer, but enough to know that this is absolutely unMailer. A combo of open-mic mixed with a bit of Finnegans Wake, some nakedlunchesque joie de vivre, stream of consciousness galore and profanity up the wazoo.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Done with Camus. The Fall is his masterpiece, followed by The Plague. The short story The Renegade is his most abstract and best piece of writing. His essay Reflections on the Guillotine is a brilliant analysis of capital punishment and how it engenders a Sisyphean cycle of revenge.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

To say that I was elated a few days ago when I found out that a Peter Matthiessen biography (by Lance Richardson) had been published is selling it short. His Far Tortuga, which is phonetically and structurally challenging, is one of the finest novelistic achievements in American fiction.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

I blame the purchasing of 15 biographies, 6 volumes of letters, 2 memoirs and 1 volume of diaries on a recent monthlong bout of literary nonfiction fever. Now I must remain optimistic and believe that I’ll have time to read them all. I’ll start with May Swenson’s biography.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Oh, hi! 2,413 pages of Sylvia Plath in today’s #bookmail.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

Rewatched Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. I understand why so many abhor this film, but if you’re willing to abandon all hope, surrender to its grueling monotony, and be governed by its sepulchral atmosphere you’ll have one of the most transcending cinematic experiences of your life.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Masterpiece! Camus turns the book into a confessional and the reader into a priest. It features one of the darkest, most reprehensible narrators (thankfully). If I ever dare to write a Top 20 of the best novels I’ve read, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this one on that list.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Fresh from the press and my latest addition to the Gertrude Stein pile. Probably the 113th book in my home library written by (or about) the matriarch of Modernism.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Come on board the Kraszna train, darlings. You won’t regret it.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Worked all day. Went to a bookstore. Both titles were sold out. Drove to another. Found them a few minutes ago. Can’t read them now. Still happy to have them.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Pausing the Dostoevsky read through I started at the beginning of the year (I need a short break from his voice). Up next: the complete fiction of Albert Camus.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

How does one engage with a writer whose body of work seems to represent the epitome of solipsistic creation? His purported novels are no more than countless vignettes conjoined in a universe of hopelessness, solitude, and total indifference. Award the Nobel Prize to Botho Strauß.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

She’s recorded in a tongue on the verge of collapse a litany of transposable voices and disjointed perspectives that reject Manichaean dualities, all to create the foundations of refurbished identities that can neither be named nor described. Award the Nobel Prize to Chus Pato.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

In his exceedingly long poetic sequences –always epic in scale– polyphony can turn into a cacophony of everyday voices as he renders, in a most accessible way, a peculiar migrant experience while expanding the possibilities of the poem. Award the Nobel Prize to Π.O. (Pi O).

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Yesterday’s purchases… I had read everything by Olga Tokarczuk available in English translation before she got the big prize, but nothing that was translated after it, so I need to remedy that. And The Sea, the Sea has been on my radar for many years. It’ll be my first Murdoch.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Did I drive like a maniac to my local bookstore upon learning that Eimear McBride’s latest novel hit the shelves on this side of the Atlantic? Is the night dark and full of terrors?🙄

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

His intellectually rigorous novels —mental abodes of a late Modernist that may produce in the reader a permanent feeling of vertigo—, masterfully explore the complexities of entropic realities, even through the consciousness of a disembodied entity. Award the Nobel Prize to Joseph McElroy.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Jacinta, the love of my life, left this world on Aug 1 at 2:59PM, shortly after turning 19 y.o. She passed away peacefully, in my arms (my request to the vet), while I whispered words of goodbye and gratitude, kissed her beautiful face, and rocked her gently, like the sweet baby she always was.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

McElroy's language is a sort of liquid. His subordinate clauses, liberated from commas, constantly bleed into the main sentence. Highly ciphered, awe-inspiring, unequivocally dumbfounding novels you don’t need to fully decrypt to appreciate. Literary titans are almost extinct. Almost.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Two translations of Dante’s Paradiso are set to come out in the year of our Lord 2025. Come July we’ll get Mary Jo Bang’s "irreverent” conclusion, published by Graywolf Press, and in August NYRB will give us D. M. Black’s second installment (anyone knows if he plans on translating Inferno?).

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

One of the first books that comes to mind when asked the anxiety-inducing question “What’s the best novel you’ve read?” / Uno de los primeros libros que me viene a la mente cuando me hacen esa pregunta que invariablemente detona ansiedad: "¿Cuál es la mejor novela que has leído?"

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

After receiving Michael Brodsky’s Invidicum (considered to be his magnum opus: 1,190 pages, 20 years in the making) and thoroughly sampling it, I had to ransack my public library bookshelves to figure out if I’ve just started reading the King of Maximalists… Seems like it.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

A reviewer once wrote that John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy was “a novel to offend everyone.” This can be said about D. Keith Mano’s Take Five, which is brilliant and one of the best kept secrets in American literature. It transcends its own mean-spiritedness through lavish verbiage and caustic humor.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

I watched this last night. Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature film reaches the level of perfection, cinematic artistry and rigorous composition most filmmakers dream of. Never have I seen a more attuned dialogue between foreground and background sustained through an entire film.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

A thing of beauty: the "animal novels" of Günter Grass.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Arrived: the complete novels of Henry Green, a “late modernist” admired by major figures of the literati (Updike, Isherwood, Welty, Auden). These are the British editions, but you can find 8 of his novels in NYRB’s catalog (a.k.a. the literary counterpart of the Criterion Collection).

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

At the rate of one book per month, this year I will also tackle the complete works of Jane Austen. I’m just not sure if I should start with Sense and Sensibility, her first novel (The Watsons is unfinished), or her juvenilia (some of the material dates back to 1787, when she was 11!).

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

David Lynch (1946-2025). Sir, you will be terribly missed.

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Luis Panini @luispanini.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

This year I plan to keep on reading authors’ complete works, like I’ve been doing since 2021. For many I’ll read 3 books at a time, switch to another and revisit them a few months later, but 3 writers will get special attention the entire year. Dostoevsky is one of them.

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