I always tell people that my favorite book is Reckless Disregard. That is Renata Adler’s account, published in 1986, of two high-profile libel trials that took place in New York City in the early ’80s. Those are Westmoreland v. CBS et al. and Sharon v. Time.

The Sharon was Ariel Sharon; Westmoreland was the US Army chief of staff; and that et al. included Mike Wallace. Superstar lawyers Floyd Abrams and David Boies swan through Adler’s chronicle. Reckless Disregard originally appeared as two pieces in the New Yorker, if you can imagine such a thing, and so the book gets to end with Cravath,

Authenticity is something we can only imagine these days. In the midst of some deep-relaxation exercise, we might picture small children playing with wooden toys or humble peasants toiling in the fields, but even our inward set pieces feel a little fake. The wooden toys are actually replicas of plastic toys that are, in turn, replicas of cartoon characters featured in blockbuster movies. The humble peasants are really actors imitating what they think hard labor looks like, based on a mix of children’s books about John Henry, Sam Cooke lyrics, and online porn.

The more unreal the world becomes,

In 1919, C. K. Scott Moncrieff first approached an English publisher with a proposal to translate Du côté de chez Swann, the novel that Marcel Proust had finally been able to see published that same year to a favorable reception in France more than a half decade after he had been forced to pay for a private printing. Scott Moncrieff’s idea went nowhere. The British house he contacted, Constable & Co., wrote back that they had never heard of the author (and bafflingly referred to him as “Prevost”). The lack of commercial interest didn’t, however, deter Scott Moncrieff. Even though he was in the

Kathy Acker met media theorist McKenzie Wark in 1995, when Acker was on tour in Australia. A novelist, essayist, and performance artist, Acker first made a name for herself in the New York art world of the 1970s, achieving widespread notoriety in 1984 when a mainstream press published the thrilling, anarchic novel Blood and Guts in High School. Acker was widely regarded as both inheritor and innovator of the literary avant-garde, and like many of her later books, Blood and Guts in High School appropriated text and themes from classic works, filtering them through the voices of multiple

The invention of kitsch, critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, was part and parcel of European industrialization. The continent’s newly dislocated masses found themselves stuck, from Birmingham to Berlin, between an urbane high culture to which they had no connection and a folk culture whose significance was indelibly rooted in the countryside they had left behind, and kitsch, Greenberg argued, was devised to fill this gap. Produced by committee, designed by formula, and motivated by profit, kitsch “pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.”

In light