IN STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, THE ANDROID DATA starts to dream, having accidentally discovered an unconscious he didn’t know he had. Soon, because his dreams are troubled, he enters psychoanalysis. Appropriately enough, he turns to another artificial intelligence for help, the computer of the starship Enterprise, which creates a holographic representation of Sigmund Freud. Later, Data dreams that he is on the Enterprise, standing with two of his companions. A phone rings. But where is it? Data’s friends open a hatch in his abdomen. An early-twentieth-century phone stands there, waiting

While Flannery O’Connor’s example suggests the value of holding on to and interrogating the kind of anomalous details that don’t do enough work in early drafts, there are also those cherished elements we resist cutting that should probably go.

Ben Lerner describes one such instance in his autofiction 10:04 concerning a short story of his, “The Golden Vanity,” that appeared in the New Yorker. He relates its conception and shares an extract of an early draft—“the prose I generated first, the kernel of the work”—detailing a plot to fake letters from famous writers that the protagonist hopes to

Megan Milks: You’re all hilarious. Where does the humor in your work come from? What kinds of strategies have you used to hone your comedic sensibilities?

Brontez Purnell: My humor is based in a very deep form of tragedy. Essentially, I have to laugh to keep from crying, or rather, I feel like I have such deep hands in comedy and drama at the same time that I’m always creating a balance. I also don’t feel like I’m really “honing” my comedy at this point. Sarcastic humor has become so formulaic and weaponized against us, that the older I get, I actually feel like my humor is becoming more

A couple of hours from Beirut, if you’re fortunate with the traffic, you come within touching distance of the Syrian border. A course northward of that brings you through the Beqaa Valley and into Baalbek. We clambered through the palimpsest of ruins in Baalbek—the Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim ruins—and, wary of the proximity to the hot war just a few miles away, wondered if this is how people get kidnapped. That evening, coming back from the ruins, we thought we’d stop in Broummana, and see Edward Said’s grave.

Literature is haunted by gravesite pilgrimages. The acolyte seeks

At the outset of his influential 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” Harold Rosenberg announced:

What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if necessary, it does the others. Yet without the definition something essential in those best is bound to be missed. The attempt to define is like a game in which you cannot possibly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by picking up each time from where the last play landed.

Rosenberg knew that the “game” of