James Greer

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  culture July 21, 2016

  Brand New Love

  The novel Supremacist documents a vision quest undertaken by the narrator, whose name is David Shapiro, and who seems to bear some resemblance to the author, whose name is also David Shapiro, Here’s where complications arise: For example, “David Shapiro” is itself a pseudonym, The fictional David Shapiro, meaning the narrator, is a twenty-six-year-old actuary student who lives in Brooklyn.

  The novel Supremacist documents a vision quest undertaken by the narrator, whose name is David Shapiro, and who seems to bear some resemblance to the author, whose name is also David Shapiro. Here’s where complications arise: For example, “David Shapiro” is itself a pseudonym. The fictional David Shapiro, meaning the narrator, is a twenty-six-year-old actuary student who lives in Brooklyn. The meta-fictional David Shapiro, meaning the author, is apparently a Manhattan-based “corporate lawyer specializing in private-equity transactions,” according to a recent New Yorker profile. Further fogging

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  fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2012

  Games of Life

  “I should tell this story the way one should tell this story to one who has never made a bed,” says the narrator of “Sent,” the final missive in Joshua Cohen’s immoderately brilliant tetralogy Four New Messages. He’s describing a bed. Or rather, he’s parodying a particular folktale style of someone describing a bed—a parody into which creep carefully considered anachronisms and authorial asides (“Better to just show the bed! Fairies! Better to roll around on the thing and hear it sing! O spirited sprites!”). In so doing he’s also talking, as he does in each of these stories, about the process

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  fiction Dec/Jan 2012

  Everything Is Cinema

  Kate Zambreno resists easy classification. Her fiction squirms under the critic’s microscope like an unruly subatomic particle, appearing first here and there and then in both places at the same time. She crams so much information into Green Girl, her second work of fiction, that I’m tempted to resort to making a list of its various sources and referents, but that would spoil the fun. The book is by turns bildungsroman, sociological study, deconstruction, polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes,