Summer Brennan
Award-winning writer and Orion Book Award finalist. American in Paris. Books: THE OYSTER WAR; HIGH HEEL. Next: THE PARISIAN SPHINX, A TRUE TALE OF ART & OBSESSION. Leonard Cohen blew me a kiss one time.
Substack: awritersnotebook.org
- In addition to everything else, fuck cancer.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanReally nuts how many men were like "Me Too went too far, and I need to email Jeffrey Epstein about it."
- Reposted by Summer BrennanThis New Yorker cover— my god.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanOur founders, though deeply flawed, understood that democracy requires an informed citizenry and a government accountable to it people. That’s why the press is the only profession protected by the Constitution. It’s also why autocrats and oligarchs seek to control and destroy it.
- Maybe Mackenzie Scott would like to buy a paper?
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- Reposted by Summer BrennanJeff Bezos' wedding last summer cost somewhere around $50M. That, alone, could have saved all 300 positions cut today at The Washington Post for a year. Of course, he wouldn't have to choose. He could do both because he's worth $250B, which is nearly the GDP of New Zealand.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanHere's who the Washington Post just laid off.
- This is becoming. sadly evergreen skeet...
- Reposted by Summer BrennanSome great news. My hybrid memoir IN OPEN COUNTRY will now be published by Little, Brown. It’s about freedom of movement and stillness in the US, and the ways capitalism & settler colonialism have shaped (and continue to shape) the answer to who has either across time. I also do a lot of walking.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanTo my view, this exchange further undermines Wolff’s claims that his relationship with Epstein was that of journalist and subject. Here, Wolff shares the pitch for funding from an accused man with Epstein, and offers commentary indicating a shared ideological commitment against the Me Too movement.
- I hadn’t known this. Two men who were accused of sexual abuse on the Shitty Media Men document that I created back in 2017 reached out to Michael Wolff for help as they looked to sue me, and Wolf forwarded their concerns to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein offered to help. www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA0...
- Reposted by Summer BrennanWhat the public does not understand about these retaliatory cases is that what is on trial is the ability for men to abuse their power against women without consequence. When women lose defamation lawsuits for speaking up, men win the right to abuse with impunity
- A healthy book ecosystem relies on professional book reviewers, not just authors reviewing their peers, although this is good and interesting too. We need both. But the professional reviewer is a keystone species in the ecosystem. We can't lose them.
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- Reposted by Summer BrennanI was sued about six weeks later.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanI hadn’t known this. Two men who were accused of sexual abuse on the Shitty Media Men document that I created back in 2017 reached out to Michael Wolff for help as they looked to sue me, and Wolf forwarded their concerns to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein offered to help. www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA0...
- Reposted by Summer BrennanI understand the reasons why it’s more jarring and consequential to see it happen among billionaires, but the kind of shrugging disinterest or impishly approving encouragement of sexual abuse among Epstein’s circle is the same dynamic that happens in less powerful milieus.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanMy favorite genre of Epstein emails are powerful people emailing WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN about how MeToo has gone too far and the woke mob must be stopped.
- Ah, of course @moiradonegan.bsky.social already found this.
- Several men named on the Shitty Media Men list of Oct 2017 reached out to Jeffrey Epstein—already a known sex offender at the time—for help. Epstein says he'll "help any way he can."
- Reposted by Summer BrennanA lot of people cannot just start a paid newsletter or become freelancers to sustain their careers. The sports, metro, and international desks did work that requires *team* resources, like legal checks, documents, access to archives, and long-term beat experience.
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- Reposted by Summer BrennanOk fine let‘s gather together the existing remnants of professional book reviewing and figure out how to support what still survives/expand options.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanI don't know what it is about idiots who buy newspapers without understanding why they exist or what their business is, but I think gutting books coverage is some kind of canary in the coalmine. These jackasses don't read books, so they assume no one else does either.
- Question for people who are on here but also still on X: why?
- MacKenzie Scott built Amazon and li'l Jeff has just been profiting off of it ever since.
- "The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet." Yeah but didn't his ex-wife do most of that anyway? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/b...
- Jeff Bezos sucks.
- "Sometimes it is like shattered gold, and sometimes like colored silks or a school of flashing fish, and sometimes like quicksilver."
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- Nurses and others who care for the elderly should be required to see pictures of patients when they were young. We need to understand that we're still us our whole lives. This is what we discover as we age. We need to see it in others. An older life, a life with limitations, is no less valuable.
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- "It is tempting, even, to abandon all ambition and return to that innocence, that quiet glow, that feeling..."
- Reposted by Summer BrennanPeople are right to be incensed, but there are more names to uplift. ICE killed an immigrant man named Silverio Villegas González in Chicagoland. He had children. Victor Manuel Diaz was kidnapped in Minneapolis and died in ICE custody on January 14. Their names deserve to be repeated, too.
- Do Americans think it is okay to execute people who DO have a criminal record in the street? Like if you shoplifted a lipstick when you were 19, or smoked weed before they legalized it in your state, the cops can just shoot you?
- I guess everyone knows this by now, but these ICE killings are blatantly not accidents. They are purposeful. They are assassinating non-violent citizens who resist the occupation, in order to instill terror in others, in the hope that they can prevent them from resisting occupation too.
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- This was not the news day for a tender little essay about scent and memory, but I didn't know that when I started editing it at 3am.
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- "Now it is late afternoon, and he is supposed to get off at this station and take a different train, while I will continue on to meet a friend in another city. He asks me to get off the train with him."
- ICE murdered Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse.
- "I’m in Hawaii, at three years old, and a fresh lei of orchids and frangipani is sitting in a pool of cool water in the hotel sink."
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- Reposted by Summer BrennanI know people keep saying this but it’s hard to communicate the depth of active resistance here. Like, I’m on random cafes and people are checking in for observation shifts. Signs everywhere. Folks in visibility vests on the corners. It’s wild. Absolutely wild.
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- I would pay good money for a @duchessgoldblatt.bsky.social advice column.
- PSA: If you didn't enjoy a piece of fiction, a book, an essay, whatever, it is not necessary to tell the creator directly. Just a thought.
- "I was thinking only of the ambition, the non-negotiable determination, the flight, the act of love. I was aware, vaguely, even when writing it, that all of our wax eventually melts; that the sea tosses below us all."
- Just a little reminder to hug the people you love. Tell them. Go see them. Be with them. Let them be with you. So many things, both deep and frivolous, are to be pursued and enjoyed in this world, with fun, with passion, but at the core, our love for each other is all that really matters.
- More important things are happening in the world than individual professional drama, mine or anyone's, but maintaining ethics, treating each other with decency, especially when one knows someone's work is paused due to serious illness—this matters too.
- Going back through DMs, we first spoke May 31st. I told her I was actively in cancer treatment and couldn't work or engage. By June 2nd she was pitching for herself. By the 6th she found a publisher and explained why, although in process of a PhD myself, I didn't qualify as a co-author. One week.
- Reposted by Summer BrennanWe’ve decided to make this story free for all readers, forever. We hope you’ll support this reporting by sharing it.
- As Homeland Security’s siege on Minneapolis enters its third week, locals are volunteering for patrol shifts, protesting in the streets, and keeping one another up to date in group texts. Read more from @scottmeslow.bsky.social in Minneapolis:
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