Reading List

Sam Barrett

23 Feb 2025 — 1 min read

I'm going to use this page as a way of keeping track of things I read over the course of the year, with the goal of keeping myself more productive and also giving more of a view into what I'm thinking about. Books listed in bold are recommended.

Prehistory

Negative Space - B.R. Yeager

Nineteen Seventy Four - David Peace

Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte

Mysterious Skin - Scott Heim

The Etched City - K.J. Bishop

A Collapse Of Horses - Brian Evenson

2025

Nostrilla - Cordwainer Smith

Soldier In The Mist (Latro #1) - Gene Wolfe

Addiction By Design - Natasha Dow Schüll

The Averoigne Archives - Clark Ashton Smith

The Face In The Frost - John Bellairs

The Necrophiliac - Gabrielle Wittkop

Necropolitics - Achille Mbembe

The Conspiracy Against The Human Race - Thomas Ligotti

Between Two Fires - Christopher Buehlman

Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) - Iain M. Banks

The Earth Wire - Joel Lane

Girlfriends - Emily Zhou

Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin

The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han

Subcontractors Of Guilt - Esra Ozyürek

The Hundred Brothers - Donald Antrim

The Expulsion of the Other - Byung-Chul Han

The Core of the Sun - Johanna Sinisalo

The Devil Takes You Home - Gabino Iglesias

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life - Giorgio Agamben

Policing Desire - Simon Watney

Solaris - Stanisław Lem

The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa

The Locked Room - Paul Auster

Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges

The Gothic Body - Kelly Hurley

In The Country of Last Things - Paul Auster

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - George Saunders

Nazi Literature of the Americas - Roberto Bolano

Amygdalatropolis - B.R. Yeager

Fascism, AI Brain, and Loving The Work

today i saw an image, posted by the official White House Twitter Account, of an image of a woman being deported, reprocessed by AI in the style of legendary animation house Studio Ghibli. this is, patently, one of the most evil things i’ve ever seen. it marks the absolute

The Burnout Essay

My Google Drive is filled with false starts. Unpublished arguments taper off and vanish, invectives and analyses halt mid-sentence. There are essays about masculinity, about films, about memory, about health, about depression. Some of them I might return to, when the time is right. But all of these attempts at

Like A Daydream, Or A Fever

They were sunset days, languid days, firefly days, monotonous days, porch-light days, haunted days, sweat-soaked days, tortuous days, dry-thunder days, mosquito days, days that stunk of pot smoke and stale beer, days butchered and dissected, days stretching asymptotically towards forever. We swam inside the warm guts of the briefest eternity.

Therapy for Dead Girls

When I was about 16, I decided that I wasn’t real. I don’t remember much of the details of those days, for better and worse. But I recall the certainty I felt then, the concreteness of my refusal. I simply stopped accepting the world. The things I experienced