pronoysarkar.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

News, as they say. Granted, there’s enough news. But this one is personal. Books to be made, especially during these times. Now as an agent representing non-fiction of all kinds.

submitted 43 days ago • 1 comment

The speech writers today

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

I am old enough to remember, and in hindsight wish, that the Y2K internet blackout had happened, and I didn’t have to actually discover what millions of people actually do think, every second of everyday.

submitted 52 days ago • 1 comment

This book, despite being published decades ago, has remained one of the most interesting explanations for the country I’ve read. Here’s to more of this, in the new year and beyond.

submitted 75 days ago • 0 comments

“Joseph Epstein, in his memoir, “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life,” said a career has five stages: “(1) Who is Joseph Epstein? (2) Get me Joseph Epstein. (3) We need someone like Joseph Epstein. (4) What we need is a young Joseph Epstein. (5) Who is Joseph Epstein?” - Dwight Garner, NYT

submitted 89 days ago • 0 comments

A well known agent told me the other day that a concern for those disillusioned by the election may tune out of media, and thus forestall the publicity efforts of new books to find their readers. I feel the truth of it, but don’t tune out books—they’ll help us through, as always.

submitted 90 days ago • 0 comments

Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1916.

submitted 92 days ago • 0 comments

Here is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, drinking coffee in a coffee shop. He will not live to know that people are using Chatgtp as therapists, and I for one am grateful for that.

submitted 92 days ago • 1 comment

It is indeed a brilliant piece, @rickperlstein.bsky.social!

submitted 95 days ago • 1 comment

A very interesting intellectual history and overview of translation, tracing its roots from Antiquity to the present. Inspired in part by Damien Searls’ philosophy of translation, who translated Jon Fosse, the essay nicely situates the translator’s dilemma www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

One of the ironic facts of social media, where information flies around, accurate or not, is that most is sourced, originally, from a book. Whether people know that or not is irrelevant; more so, it’s clear hardly anyone reads the source, just shares or engages with the information.

submitted 97 days ago • 0 comments

More a book editor than a website maker, but decided to make a simple site for authors, published or debut, who need help. Feel free to share with anyone who may need freelance help, and wants trade publishing insight: Pronoysarkareditorial.com

submitted 98 days ago • 0 comments

Martin Amis mused that after publishing four novels without much fanfare, by the 80s, with his fifth book, he began getting attention, though he does not attribute it to the public pining for novels. Rather, he thinks the media needed to pad the pages, and running out of topics, began covering books

submitted 101 days ago • 0 comments

Appropriate.

submitted 102 days ago • 0 comments

Paraphrasing from Chernow’s Grant biography, but of his taciturn nature, a general remarked that the former President was so quiet he would be “silent in 20 languages.” Good quips are hidden all over history, and often by people who aren’t famous.

submitted 105 days ago • 0 comments

A lovely Icelandic term for pins and needles (tingling after your foot goes numb) is stjörnur í skónum, or “stars in your shoes.” A Yoruba version is pajapaja (“kill dog kill dog”). And the best one I’ve heard in German (uttered by a friend’s child) was mein Fuß glitzert. It means “my foot twinkles”

submitted 105 days ago • 54 comments

I’m only resharing because I love this show, and I love the books and ideas and wit of @kevinmkruse.bsky.social

submitted 105 days ago • 1 comment

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864-1901), Little Dog Lying Down, c.1888. Oil on panel, 32.5 x 41 cm.

submitted 108 days ago • 0 comments

I love Rabih’s work, and will be reading his latest.

submitted 109 days ago • 0 comments

Well, sad to miss this! Gornick’s Odd Woman in the City is a gem, an ode to NYC, and a book that has no “pitch,” and yet entirely delightful.

submitted 111 days ago • 0 comments

Percival Everrett’s James, which gave me so much joy, winning a National Book Award might finally be some good news, and that’s been hard to come by. Funniest modern masterpiece, and a brilliant study about code switching. Go read it.

submitted 111 days ago • 0 comments

I think it’s useful to remember fun words which have been co-opted by the internet, and made boring. A troll, for example, is much better as a beast that eats children. Platforms could be shoes, or a stool, used to get things beyond reach. Discourse, well, that never was worth much—maybe that can go

submitted 112 days ago • 0 comments

E.B White’s advice for writing for children, though doubles as good advice for writing in general.

submitted 112 days ago • 0 comments

Access to coffee, a library of books, a room of my own, and a pond I can walk around, which is not connected to the internet, is the starter pack for me.

submitted 112 days ago • 0 comments

And countless million “experts” with a phone.

submitted 113 days ago • 0 comments

Perhaps appropriate to discover, while reading essays by Martin Amis, and then fact checked by an essay from the Atlantic from 2012, that the term “American Exceptionalism,” was coined by Stalin, in the 1920s, as an insult, not an affirmation, of his view of American values.

submitted 113 days ago • 0 comments

Another @davidenrich.bsky.social! On the court, how can I not read it? Excited and congrats!

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

With death inevitable, you can spend all your time reading every possible think piece, news item, and feature, amounting to a drop of the information ocean. But that’s just in the past hour. So you can perish twice - psychologically and physically - reading everything, yet really nothing at all.

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

Will be an incredible book. Chickenshit Club is masterful, and Jesse Eisinger’s reporting for ProPublica on this story is wide reaching. Can’t wait for this.

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

For those curious about the incoming Attorney General, if he is approved by the Senate, I suggest you pick up @washingtonpost.com’s Dana Milbank’s FOOLS ON THE HILL, which I had the privilege of publishing. It’s got some “colorful” stories of Gaetz, and how talented of a legislator he is.

submitted 119 days ago • 0 comments

In these times, good writing and thinking about the world, and engaging with it, is as important as ever. Whatever I may be feeling, personally, working with writers who challenge how we think, and make me think, is a small victory, and I don’t take it for granted.

submitted 120 days ago • 0 comments

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." - Joseph Brodsky, poet and essayist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1987.

submitted 120 days ago • 0 comments

Terrific, sobering, brilliant book, one I began before the election, and can’t put down.

submitted 121 days ago • 0 comments