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Max Lawton

@maxdaniellawton

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novelist. translator of Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Turkish novels (Vladimir Sorokin, Michael Lentz…). musician.

https://t.co/CRaClH38r7
Joined May 2014
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
Very grateful to Andrei for the opportunity to talk about Sorokin and a variety of other mad projects. Andrei is one of my heroes, so having my first interview in print on his sublime blog is truly surreal. Enjoy!
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Interview with Max Lawton: On reading Russian literature, translating Sorokin, books in need of...

We finished this interview a month ago when even in the worst nightmare I could not have conceived that the deranged Kremlin dictator would launch an open, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If we wer…

theuntranslated.wordpress.com
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
After reading 2666 and THE KINDLY ONES in high school, this was the book young Max was desperate to see come out in English. On Tuesday, it finally is 😍😍😍
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
8 months
THE OFFICIAL COVER! @nyrbclassics @NYRB_Imprints
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
6 months
Pop “literary fiction” that cannibalizes a highly calcified notion of literature as watered-down realism to sell a corporate product. Books for nobody. To be read, then forgotten. This is what writers are up against. To wage war against it—our only hope.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
Happy publication day! High point of my translation career so far and all that’s to come… (press release about some of these soon…)
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
6 months
If you write prose inspired by modernism or postmodernism, it is a grave error not to have read much of the 19th- and 18th-century prose-fiction canons: to understand what you are rebelling against with your 20th-century forebears.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
If Pynchon's Civil War novel never sees the light of day, it will be the greatest tragedy in the history of American letters
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
What an incredible trifecta of sustained prose fireworks. If you read English, read these!
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
Pynchon learned much of his method from Dickens, I’m certain of it
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
26 days
Profile dropped
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The translator bringing Vladimir Sorokin to English readers

Max Lawton on dragging the most complex and esoteric foreign texts into the English language

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
Updated faves
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
4 months
My babies are here!! @nyrbclassics @NYRB_Imprints @wself
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
The two most boring ways of people trying to establish their literary bonafides: Moshfegh hate and Murakami hate
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
To my mind, it is not Proust, but Céline who is the great French modernist. There is nothing fundamentally new in Proust’s work—it is his tempo, scale, and tonality that differentiate him from his 19th-century forebears. Not so with Céline (Proust as Wagner, Céline as Stravinsky)
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 months
Rights cleared for this cover on my birthday! What a present. So excited for this one, coming from @nyrbclassics in February.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
4 months
2024 prediction: literary neorealism dies a stale death; nobody mourns its passing; big publishers start publishing weird books again; the reading public rejoices.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
Request an ARC of this and write about it! An incredible translation of an incredible book by an incredible author. In the land of Turkish literature, Atay is king.
@Ralph_Hubbell
Ralph Hubbell
@Ralph_Hubbell
1 month
Ladies and gents, Oğuz Atay has a cover:
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
July, 1979: Every old book is a ghost story
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
You’re not ready for what’s coming from @nyrbclassics 🥵🥵🥵🥵
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
By the time I finish these, my scapula will be healed
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
The philistinism of the tech world is awe-inspiring.
@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
@tsarnick
3 months
Nowhere is cultural acceleration more evident than in the movies. As Andrej Karpathy says, movies from before 1995 are slow, boring and naive.
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Max Lawton
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2 years
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
One day back in NYC, this book showed up in my mailbox. I still don’t know who sent it to me.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Final draft delivered to @nyrbclassics @NYRB_Imprints
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
This has gotta be VINELAND
@jasonosia
Jason
@jasonosia
3 months
Behold your first look at the first Paul Thomas Anderson film poised to break the $100 million mark: reuniting him with star Leonardo DiCaprio, following Anderson’s uncredited screenplay rewrites on 'Killers of the Flower Moon’
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
Where I will be translating Sorokin, Littell, Kracht, Moresco, Céline, and writing my own second novel
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN really does make Proust seem propulsive—almost like a Tom Clancy of the form—by comparison
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
And just like that, the short-story collection / mosaic-novel I’ve been writing for three years is complete. THE WORLD. My new novel, THE ABODE, begins on Jan 1 🥵💪🫡
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
Beyond the review that shall not be named, Joy Williams also writes about RED PYRAMID and BLUE LARD in the new issue of @bookforum 🥵🥵🥵
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
8 months
The copyediting process for BLUE LARD is now complete!! Now for typesetting and proofreading @nyrbclassics
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
26 days
I mean…
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
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26 days
Profile dropped
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
Updated top ten films of all time
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
If only he hadn’t been so wrong about so much
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
New Knausgaard series really is the literary equivalent of getting super stoned on an October night in high school and listening to black metal as you walk down suburban streets, shadowy figures in the distance and leaves crunching underfoot. The highest of compliments.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
Pssst… Anglosphere… this is meant to be called THE THIRD REICH
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Max Lawton
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2 years
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
Boys’ night @BretEastonEllis @blakebutler
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
it's literally me
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
4 months
Forget FINNEGANS WAKE: Browning’s SORDELLO and Melville’s CLAREL are probably the toughest texts I’ve ever read in English
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
How strange… like a big bowl of porridge with the occasional bite of white truffle
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 days
This book rocks. Krasznahorkai's version of THE TERMINATOR
@ddillingworth
Dustin Illingworth
@ddillingworth
9 days
Hold my calls.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
Vladimir just told me that one needs to reread WAR AND PEACE every four years. Sorokin's prescription for the day.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
23 days
My novel THE ABODE is done !! The end of an informal trilogy including PROGRESS and THE WORLD (the latter of which is stories). Three books that will rock the Anglosphere 🥵🥵🥵🥵 Coming soon 🥵🥵🥵🥵 to shelves near you 🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Holiday romance
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Max Lawton
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11 months
Imagine being such a bad motherfucker that this is how you go out…
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
250k words of final edits done. Dang. I need a drink. Both this and BLUE LARD are officially on their way…
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
The first book that made me realize I could write long prose was Bolaño’s ANTWERP. And yet, every time I finish a work of prose, I inevitably realize that I have yet again failed to write my ANTWERP.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 years
2022 from @nyrbclassics .
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 months
First thing I did upon turning 30 today was to finish a first good, readable draft of SCHATTENFROH with @nordicnovellas 🥵🥵🥵
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Max Lawton
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8 months
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 months
Official announcements coming soon ;) But all of you who are eagerly awaiting SCHATTENFROH, pick this up from @NewDirections and give it a read. It's the only book that it is 100% a necessary prerequisite to have read before Lentz's masterpiece.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
8 months
A long affair begins with a single session of heavy petting…
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
6 months
Spotted at @skylightbooks 😅😅😅
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
The MOMA cinema: two elderly men got into a fist fight during a very graphic sex scene in NYPHOMANIAC
@janusfilms
Janus Films
@janusfilms
1 year
What's the craziest thing that ever happened to you in a movie theater?
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
When I was 12, I did a book report on THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and was yelled at by my English teacher. She slammed the purple paperback down—asked how I dared to write about such smut. It’s thanks to her I translate such naughty things from 6 languages. And write smut too 🥵
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
13 days
An incredible paragraph of descriptive prose
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
22 days
All you need to know about the state of literature in the Anglosphere is that this book languishes, unpublished…
@IainSmithNZ
Iain Smith
@IainSmithNZ
22 days
I mean, that’s my kind of book.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
This sounds dope
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Knausgaard wanted to be Peter Handke Jr. on a more mega scale, but ended up as a conceptual diarist and Stephen King acolyte. Both grand success AND terrible failure. No accounting of Knausgaard is complete without understanding this failure.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
My first story in print! Coming in early Feb from @LAReviewofBooks
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
11 months
Holy shit… to go out with that last diptych… a king right up until the end with a last testament that is nothing but void, void, and more void. American literature is infinitely poorer today than it was yesterday.
@PublishersWkly
Publishers Weekly
@PublishersWkly
11 months
BREAKING NEWS: Cormac McCarthy, a preeminent voice in American literature over the better part of the past half-century, died today at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., his publisher, Knopf, confirmed. He was 89. Full obit to follow.
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10 months
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Max Lawton
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28 days
Beautiful 🥰🥰🥰 and an honor to be published alongside Gerald Murnane (as well as everyone else here)
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Grand news! Sorokin’s newest masterpiece, DOCTOR GARIN—his, as it were, 22nd-century version of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO—has been signed up by @nyrbclassics !! Coming very soon in English…
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
29 days
A fantastic review of Vladimir’s new books by the legendary Joy Williams!
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Into the Wild

Vladimir Sorokin's high-risk fiction – Joy Williams

www.bookforum.com
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
What a handsome volume !
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
P+V on BLUE LARD (from @NewYorker , 2005). This is the best praise Sorokin’s masterpiece could possibly receive.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 days
A description of the war in Ukraine in the new novel by Antonio Moresco (with one of the best characterizations of Putin I’ve ever read). This novel is a howling lament for the state of our world in 2024. Beautiful and terrifying.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
🥹🥹🥹
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
Love the first line in this review of BLUE LARD and RED PYRAMID in The Financial Times!
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 months
Irish coffee this morning to drink to my hero: 68 and never going to stop being a mad, visionary genius and a handsome devil. My hero, mentor, role model, friend, favorite writer, and, the term that encompasses it all, lit-batya: many happy returns!
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Finally gave in to @mervatim ’s bibliophilic thirst traps
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
3 months
Bestseller on Amazon! Let’s sell out the first print run!
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
A swagged-out Vladimir with his twin daughters, Masha and Anya
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
My favorite Russian novels of the 20th century. Read the whole progression in order for Sorokin to make the most sense. Or don’t!
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
My mosaic-novel / collection of leitmotif narratives / hall of mirrors / gallery of religious icons drawn from characters presented by real life is almost done. It’s called THE WORLD. Then it’s onto my real second novel: THE ABODE.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
A few strands of Pynchon and Nabokov’s DNA
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
Fantastic article about Vladimir in the Times today
He Envisioned a Nightmarish, Dystopian Russia. Now He Fears Living in One. (Published 2022)

With eight forthcoming translations of his books, Vladimir Sorokin is gaining recognition in the West just as, he says, Russian writers need to fight back in a semantic war on truth.

www.nytimes.com
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
Vladimir Sorokin, J.G. Ballard, Edgar Allan Poe, Roberto Bolaño, Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges
@postcardsfrmv
Vanessa Saunders
@postcardsfrmv
1 month
Who are the best short stories writers of all time?
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
I’m honored to have translated Vladimir’s brave words.
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Vladimir Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power | Vladimir Sorokin

Putin’s end goal isn’t Ukraine but western civilization – the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat

www.theguardian.com
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
Speaking of the reading… here is a BLUE LARD blurb from @blakebutler 🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
Xmas books
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
Happy day!
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
5 months
TFW you’re about to finish your first draft of DOCTOR GARIN
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6 months
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
Correct order of Houellebecq novels from best to worst: The Elementary Particles, Serotonin, Submission, Extension of the Field of the Struggle, The Map and the Territory, Annihilate, Platform, The Possibility of an Island...
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
Verdict is in: underrated
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 month
Reading old books is a very breedable trait
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
4 months
Sent my mom the French HORCYNUS ORCA and my parents’ cat is inexorably drawn to the book
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
7 months
OK… let’s see what’s up
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
Almost every bookstore we pass, Vladimir stops to read a few lines from the new Stephen King novel (FAIRY TALE) aloud. This is an American prayer.
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
6 months
The written word is the ultimate drug.
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
8 months
Anyone who says Martin Amis wasn’t a stylist is, frankly, an idiot
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
u can call me Mr. In-Print
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Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
The beautiful review by @ddillingworth in print today!
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
4 months
WAR AND PEACE has 2 epilogues of pseudo-Hegelian philosophy; some readers recommend skipping them—what do they really add to the text? Proust upped the ante on Tolstoy by writing 6 novels worth of epilogue to SWANN’S WAY. Nobody recommends reading only SWANN’S WAY, and yet…
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 years
Now available to order!
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
1 year
All forthcoming
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
2 months
A preview of SCHATTENFROH (edited by @nordicnovellas ) — don’t sleep on this shit!
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The White Review Writing in Translation Anthology (pre-order)

The White Review Writing in Translation Anthology collects some of the most innovative and exciting writers working today, placing already...

thewhitereview.bigcartel.com
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
6 months
Coming soon 🤓🤓🤓
@ryanhasbadtaste
The Republic of Bad Taste
@ryanhasbadtaste
6 months
Make this available in English you cowards!
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@maxdaniellawton
Max Lawton
@maxdaniellawton
9 months
Autumn announcement impending
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