Sarah Pyke

@sarahpyke

teaching children's and YA literature at the University of Münster london.ac.uk/seized-books | #QueerBibliography researching and writing various things close reading forever

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Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 3d

TIL that Rita Mae Brown’s first book was a poetry collection titled The Hand That Cradles The Rock

White hardback book. The text in blue reads THE HAND THAT CRADLES THE ROCK rita mae brown. It was published in 1971 by New York University Press in their Contemporaries series.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 14d

They thank you

A black-and-white kitten leaps vertically in the air, paws outstretched, unhinged expression on her face

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 14d

I’m so sorry to hear this and I hope the pain begins to ease in the next while. You clearly gave Mr Bean a lovely life. Ex-feral Gertie and Midge here say be gentle with yourself

Tabby cat asleep on a pale green chair showing an expanse of unfeasibly fluffy tummy

Black and white cat curled on a duvet, one paw over her eyes, as if to say ‘it’s all too much’

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 21d

on Wednesday I wrapped up the fifteenth week of teaching this semester, yesterday I took a very long train ride to a small French town, bonnes vacances à tous

Croissants, confiture framboise and two books on a table, Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash and MJ Harrison’s The End of Everything

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 22d

Our second piece is out! A reflection by @jenniegouck.bsky.social & me on the online conference we organised in Feb, Thinking of the Children: Book Bans, Censorship and Literature for Young People (belated, huge thanks to our presenters & 370+ registered participants!) muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Screenshot from a short article. The first part reads:

Won't Somebody Think of the Children?
by JENNIFER GOUCK and SARAH PYKE

In January 2025, just four days into the new Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that they had ended the so-called “book ban hoax.” Eleven pending civil rights complaints related to book bans in public schools were dismissed and the position of book ban coordinator—a role created by the Biden administration to address intellectual freedom violations in schools and federally funded institutions—was eliminated.
But book banning is not a hoax. It’s all too real. As writer and activist Kelly Jensen reminds us:

The young people [in the United
States] who will be entering college in the 2026–2027 school year were in the eighth grade when book banning began its latest national increase. For young people in some states…, this means they’ve never had access to a wide swath of books on topics like racism, gender, puberty, or sexuality that their peers in other states have.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 22d

second-hand books come with surprises

A cutting from 2004 from the FAZ about Judith Butler winning a prize for ‘bad’ writing, tucked into the back of a book on ‘difficult’ academic writing

Printed paper from a café in Bielefeld. Repeating yellow semi circles on a white background, brown lettering, brown and yellow print of a timbered building

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 23d

…just sharing these pics in the last week of teaching for no reason whatsoever…Mary Magdalene in Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Niccolò dell'Arca (1463).

Grieving figures gather around the body of Christ. Terracotta sculpture Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Niccolò dell'Arca.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· 23d

started the semester with a little work-related jaunt to Bologna…This is Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Niccolò dell'Arca, from around 1463.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jul 3

G.D.H. and Margaret Cole not dole

Dust jacket for G.D.H. and M. Cole's detective novel Death of a Star, published by the Crime Club. A 1930s starlet screams into a mirror.

Dust jacket for G.D.H. and Margaret Cole's Toper's End, published by Macmillan. A sinister figure flees a house surrounded by skeletal trees; blue and black house against a red background.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jul 1

so is this

Three overlapping rectilinear shapes with circles in them (Dame Barbara Hepworth, Oblique Forms, 1969, Lithograph on paper, image: 556 x 730 mm, Tate)

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jun 28

Here she is! Corralled before being returned to her actual home

A tortoise with a blue spot on her shell, in a cardboard box

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jun 26

Oh man, me too

The cover of Alive by Piers Paul Read, about the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jun 6

ahahahaa JANE!!

Extract from Mansfield Park. Miss Crawford is saying “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jun 6

A funny thing about moving to Germany is occasionally coming across references to Fischer Verlag and being reminded that they are a real, prestigious publishing house based in Frankfurt and not, in fact, a sage psychoanalyst (the Herr Doktor) invented by Joe Cornish to make Adam Buxton feel better

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Jun 4

today is a public holiday and I’ve been working hard recently so I’m taking some much needed time to lie on the sofa. Anyway this is the first annotation in our copy (not made by me)

A screen-shot of Tony Tanner’s introduction to Mansfield Park. The phrase ‘sofa-bound inertia’ has been underlined in black ink, not too neatly. I estimate this annotation was made approx. 35 years ago.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 31

Your husband places a heartfelt ad in the @lrb.co.uk but misspells ‘woman’. Divorce Y/N?

Personal ad in the London Review of Books:

“Man, approaching 50, good-looking, wants to share the joy brought to him by the half-Greek, half-French women — now his wife and, for life, the mother of our little P . . . our precious one. Days and nights by your side, a privilege.”

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 28

being able to skewer the usual run of events like this is so utterly damning and so, so depressing. The whole article is a really excellent summary but a bleak fucking read

Screenshot from Stefan Collini’s LRB piece on UK universities: “For example, where once a university had departments of history, philosophy, theology and classics, with perhaps sixty staff altogether, it undertakes a reorganisation that abolishes separate departments and creates instead a ‘school of historical and critical studies’ with maybe forty staff or fewer. A new head of school is appointed from outside the university to enforce a new culture; at the same time and for a mixture of reasons, priority has to be given to getting external research funding and generating links with outside bodies or communities that can be used to demonstrate the university’s ‘impact’. Interdisciplinary projects become almost mandatory.”

Screenshot from Stefan Collini’s LRB article on UK universities: “The old model of inducting students into the craft mysteries of a single discipline is replaced by transdisciplinary courses addressing ‘major societal issues’. As part of the ‘rationalisation’, the four long-serving departmental administrators are made redundant or redeployed, leaving the new school reliant on the shifting personnel of the central administrative services division. The loss of outstanding teachers, the loss of accumulated intellectual capacity, the loss of expertise, experience and sense of identification effected by such changes impoverish the culture of this part of the university, though all that is deemed of little consequence if it means that ‘line management’ is ‘streamlined’ and the balance sheet looks healthier. But students recognise what is happening and are, understandably, not happy about it.”

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 28

as a pretty-much-non-German speaking person teaching German students in English, continually amazed at their language capacities and skills, this is both extraordinarily sad and extraordinarily embarrassing. What a country

Screenshot from Stefan Collini’s LRB article on UK universities: “All that remains in some places is a ‘language centre’, equipped with the latest technology to help beginners achieve some basic fluency. The full range of modern language teaching grounded in the literatures and cultures of the respective countries is increasingly available only in a select number of more confident institutions. When trying to identify the causes of the decline, which in this case include but are clearly not confined to the funding system, one obvious culprit is the decision of the Blair government in 2002 to make a foreign language no longer a compulsory school subject after age fourteen. The result of this and wider cultural changes is that, at university level, only Spanish of the modern European languages can be said to be in even a minimally healthy state: French is ailing but alive, German and the so-called ‘smaller’ languages are mortally wounded and have in many places disappeared.”

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 18

what's going on here

A five star book review with the heading 'you can read this out loud to yourself'. The review reads, in full: 'just sent this lovely little book to my adult sons to read with their new wives. everyone was quite pleased.'

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 12

just read the Guardian article about Bold Tendencies at 20 and now I feel 1000 years old www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Screen shot that describes Peckham in 2007 as basically a wasteland with ‘a single dive bar called Bar Story’

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 5

yes

White wall with 'WE LIVE IN A SUSAIETY' scrawled in black marker pen

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 5

graffiti, Bologna

Ochre wall with 'QUEER RIOT' spraypainted in red and '+ MINESTRONE / - MACHOLONE' sprayed in purple

White wall with 'ZONA UNI TRANSFEMMINISTA' sprayed in black

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· May 2

secrets

a pink rosebud, surrounded by dark green shiny leaves, half in sunshine and half in shadow. It’s about the size of a cherry tomato and all balled up tight…for now…but it’s getting ready to go crazy

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Apr 4

ahaha ouch www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Traces of real affection are discernible in the archives. A Portuguese sacristan sent plaintive love letters to a guitarist, recalling ‘the heart in your loins, when I touched it with my fingers, and instantly it sprang up!’ The letters survive because the guitarist passed them to the Portuguese Inquisition, confirming modern dating advice about musicians.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Apr 4

Patricia Lockwood is very good on academic squeamishness in relation to Willa Cather’s queerness but this was my favourite bit www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If you really can’t hear that current running in the earth, in the cave between the stone lips, well, not everyone does. It may be a matter of knowing where people are likely to hide things – cruets in the cave, stories within stories, love.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Apr 2

Nice to see this 'Letter from the Banned Books Network Münster' out in Bookbird, a collaboration w my fantastic colleagues @jenniegouck.bsky.social, @corinnanorue.bsky.social & Silvia Schultermandl (also ft. an exhibition & book group organised by our brilliant students) muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Screenshot from a short article. The first part reads:

A Letter from the Banned Books Network Münster
by JENNIFER GOUCK, CORINNA NORRICK-RÜHL, SARAH PYKE,
and SILVIA SCHULTERMANDL
Dear educators, librarians, students, readers—
Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines or the footage on social media. A classroom setup, recorded on a smartphone: “I’m
not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching .... According to our president, there’s only two genders” (Harrison). In September 2025, a student taking a children’s literature class at Texas A&M University objected to course content that complicated—entirely appropriately—the concept of binary gender. The instructor, Melissa McCoul, was fired (though a faculty panel has now unanimously ruled against this). The dean of the college of arts and science and the head of the department both defended McCoul and were also removed from their posts (Patel and Goodman; Blinder).
This hasn’t come out of the blue.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Mar 27

happy birthday Frank

Frank O’Hara on the phone, the rotary kind with a long curly cord

Frank O’Hara sitting down, reading a book with a cat on his lap

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Mar 21

Flearoy went missing and we had a flyer through our door (which is how I learned his name). I’m pretty sure he turned up again, but a few weeks later I saw this in the local Tesco. I like to think they briefly ran off to start a new life together, before realising their fundamental incompatibility

Missing poster for a lost cat. The photo is a stretched jpeg of a tabby cat reclining on a grey sofa. The cat’s name is Flerkin.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Mar 7

This is the Vittorio Scarpati drawing, by the way — isn’t it good

What Happened to My Lungs? pen-and-ink drawing on notebook paper by Vittorio Scarpati, as featured in Margaret Galvan’s book In Visible Archives. A man lies on his back in bed, his lungs have become a book and pages are floating around him.

Sarah Pyke@sarahpyke· Feb 27