Reposted by SWERVESWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 25/07/2026SWERVE 6 available SOON! From bookshops throughout Ireland and @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk. Cover image Cork artist Oonagh Hurley. 002
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 25/07/2026SWERVE 6 available SOON! From bookshops throughout Ireland and @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk. Cover image Cork artist Oonagh Hurley. 002
Reposted by SWERVEJonathan Wonham @jonathanwonham.bsky.social · 16/11/2025I just received the splendid Issue 4 of Swerve Magazine (literature and arts) in which I have six poems written for and about the people of Gaza. Thank you to the editors of Swerve for including this work. Linocut illustrations by Nick Wonham. #SwerveJournal #poetry @swervejournal.bsky.social 051
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/11/2025“The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.” ~ Guy Gavriel Kay 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/11/2025“She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are.” 000
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/11/2025"Later, with strange galaxies turning in strange gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full." ~ Stephen King 000
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” ~ Shirley Jackson 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.” ~ David Foster Wallace 040
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025"I saw the true nature of the ordered cosmos upon which I had based my hopes: its mutability and insubstantiality, as if it were merely a castle in the sand waiting helplessly and absurdly upon a deserted shore for the ravenous tide to flow in and devour it." ~ Matt Cardin 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025"Time flowed by like a black river that I watched from a stationary point on some undefined shore. I hovered above everything, clung to nothing, and regarded the world and its inhabitants as figments of a fleeting and pointless dream." ~ Matt Cardin 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 13/08/2025"The crack that runs through everything reaches across all time and space, travels jaggedly through all past and all potentiality. It is the slow fracture in the ice, the worm coring its way through the apple, coring the human heart. It is the following shadow." ~ Laird Barron 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 26/07/2025"Time is a ring. Everyone and everything gets squished under the wheel." ~ Laird Barron 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 26/07/2025"Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you." ~ Laird Barron 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 26/07/2025"Children are dying. That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world are hidden in those three words." ~ Steven Erickson 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 03/07/2025“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 24/06/2025“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 14/06/2025"These bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.” ~ Algernon Blackwood 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 02/06/2025“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” ~ Dostoevsky 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 19/05/2025“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and The Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky 020
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 19/05/2025“To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 05/05/2025“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” ~ Clive Barker 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 05/05/2025“Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.” ~ Steven Erikson 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 22/04/2025"There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it." ~ Steven Erikson 030
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 13/04/2025Reading event @ 8:00 pm on 17 April. Don’t miss it! 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 02/04/2025“Destiny has no beeper; Destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.” ~ David Foster Wallace 031
Reposted by SWERVEJonathan Wonham @jonathanwonham.bsky.social · 26/03/2025Excited for THIS! #PalestineBookAwards 041
Reposted by SWERVEJonathan Wonham @jonathanwonham.bsky.social · 21/03/2025Some exciting news... I've been invited to Ireland for a writing residency by SWERVE (annual literary magazine / Lit Lounge / writing & art retreats). It will be the first time I've been a writer-in-residence. SWERVE is making great strides with its beautiful journal @swervejournal.bsky.social 141
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 20/03/2025“Enlightenment isn’t necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.” ~ Laird Barron 010
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 20/03/2025“There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains.” ~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 031
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 19/03/2025‘iIf you stop being a princess you become a kitchen maid. You can’t ever become a librarian or a tax collector.’ Colin Burrow on folk tales and the Brothers Grimm: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukColin Burrow · Ogres are cool: Grimm TalesThe only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed... 0114
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 20/03/2025‘When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future.’ Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukJudith Butler · This Is WrongWe need a better understanding of the fears exploited by authoritarians: who is this ‘migrant’, so dangerous they... 310836
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 20/03/2025‘In Austen’s writing, humiliation can be shielded by comedy, and bruised feelings to some extent mollified, such that anger and grief can be transformed into a kind of sympathetic, knowing, female amusement.’ Freya Johnston on Jane Austen www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukFreya Johnston · Itch to Shine: Austen’s SuitorsThe main business of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life... 0154
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 03/03/2025‘At first sight, each of the three brothers is an exemplar of one particular way of thinking, and of living, and they are totally at odds. Who’s in the right?’ Daniel Soar on The Brothers Karamazov: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukDaniel Soar · Will I, Won’t I? Dostoevsky’s KissIt’s a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written... 0142
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 06/03/2025“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin 000
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 01/03/2025From one of my favorite short stories: "He ran, trying to stumble faster and to deafen himself and his thoughts with his panting - for behind him in the dark he could hear a leisurely creaking which could be both the sound of limbs and, worse, a kind of laughter." ~ "Blacked Out" by Ramsey Campbell 000
SWERVE @swervejournal.bsky.social · 28/02/2025T.E.D Klein describing a hole in the floor: “Beneath it, now exposed to view, lay a wide semicircular drainage hole that extended, from the look of it, hundreds of feet down to some place Coleridge might have dreamed of, where waters flowed in everlasting night.” ~ Children of The Kingdom 000
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 24/02/2025‘Merkel vehemently rejects the notion that the fundamental distinction in politics is between friend and foe.’ Christopher Clark on Angela Merkel’s memoir: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukChristopher Clark · A Degree of Light-Heartedness: Merkel’s Two LivesAngela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed... 0143
Reposted by SWERVELondon Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 25/02/2025‘The characters in these novels are deeply self-absorbed, their anxious ruminations accounting for much of the irony and pathos.’ Tim Park on the Canadian-Hungarian novelist David Szalay: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...lrb.co.ukTim Parks · You should get a job: David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’All of David Szalay’s stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity... 0102
Reposted by SWERVELRB Bookshop @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk · 24/02/2025Our current bestsellers 💥 lrb.me/6jh 081
