Eleonora Balsano

Thank you so much Jon for this opportunity and for the amazing reading you and Emma did of two of my stories. It was a wonderful experience! 🙏🙏🙏

All I want is to hold your hands and feel your nearness. A modest wish? And yet it does not cleave the night and the distance. Franz Kafka, 1913.

Marc Chagall, Blue Lovers

@lumchanmfa @DeeshaPhilyaw @avitusbcarle MAny many congratulations Melissa!!!

I’m still buzzing from my awesome book launch!! Thank you @DeeshaPhilyaw for being a part of it and for your wonderful questions and @avitusbcarle for being an amazing host. Thank you to everyone who came and thank you to my friends who helped and supported me ❤️❤️❤️

@andrewbertaina Someone told me years ago : fifteen is a disease. I can now confirm that. Just passing it on :D

Kid turned 15 today. Very odd. Now an annoying parent who just says, I remember when you were a baby over and over.

@andrewbertaina Can't wait to receive mine, any day now! Am totally hooked.

Childish excitement about continuing this book! Volume III On the calculation of volume by Solvej Balle TR Barbara Haveland

Epic online salon tonight! Book launches! European literature quiz! Amazing readings! You should all have been there....

New Flash by @CitizenBego "Winter lay down fat in its white robe as if to die. The war was over, and he ached to get home after years of service in foreign parts." fracturedlit.com/train-home/

Loved this! Perfectly bittersweet.

We also have many exciting online events coming up. First up is Café Littéraire: European Book Club, 7 October. We're discussing the excellent I Who Have Never Known Men with our host @norami

Just started reading a book about Joyce Lussu, a fascinating writer I have only just discovered. ‘Tis the poem she wrote for the love of her life, anti-fascist intellectual Emilio Lussu. ‘The long slumber was before Meeting you. Now that I’ve found you I don’t want to sleep I want my eyes open To see your face Now that you’ve smiled to me I want to always think’

I got married long before dating apps were invented & I often think about how my life would have been affected. Would have I used them or recoiled from? Do everyone now uses them?

So, my dearest girl, it is evening again after a sleepless afternoon, nothing more is written, only to this girl to whom one always wants to write, from whom one always wants to hear, with whom one always wants to be, in whom one would most like to disappear. Franz Kafka, 1912

@andrewbertaina @undersunonline Love this Andrew

New essay that started as a tweet copied below is up today @undersunonline . Proud of this one and hope you'll take a look. Tweet in reply/bio.

We're online for our salon this evening. If you're at a loose end join us! Our first reader is @AbbyManzella

Listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/5s8ep3… or on any other podcasting platform

There is always a moment, when we start writing in a second language, that we self-censor, feeling the magnitude of our incompetence. We think we’re not ready, that we’re not ‘good enough’, as Heidi Marjamäki, author and associate fiction editor of @okaydonkeymag, explains in this last episode of Season 4. In the end, we realise there is no such thing as good enough when it comes to language, whether it’s our mother tongue or a second one. Language is always evolving, and so are we. Thank you all for listening and for writing such lovely reviews of the show. I’ll be taking a short break for the summer, but the list of guests for Season 5 is growing…

@brecht_dp Am I the only one who never misses the good ol’ days? Happy bday to you both!

My son turned 16 this week and this picture made me think of that scene in The Office where Andy says, "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days, before you've actually left them"

@andrewbertaina Oh I wanted to read it!

Wrote about a book I loved. Link in reply