One of the many unnamed intelligence officials quoted in Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars declares that the drone is “the most precise weapon in the history of warfare.” It is a claim that’s repeated throughout the book. For General David Deptula, who oversaw the Air Force drone program in its early years, this aerial tool represents a radical departure from “the industrial age of warfare,” when pilots would simply drop thousands of unguided tons of ordinance in the general direction of their targets. Drones, which can loiter over a target for days, if not weeks, are capable

Is the phrase “a farce set in art school” redundant? Cate Dicharry’s first novel takes that view, and while this position could easily be insufferable as well as unnecessary—hitting the broad side of a barn is not exactly a daring challenge—she makes it an unvarnished delight. This is an especially wise authorial move given how well-worked a genre the campus novel is—and how brave or even foolhardy it is to follow the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Yet contrary to the opinion of some (“Last rites for the campus novel”), the genre is not over, or

Since the invention of messianism, every generation, regular as clockwork, wonders if it might be the last. History is planted thick with prophets of the end times: John of Patmos, David Koresh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Some make for better reading than others.

Dennis Cooper’s latest book, Zac’s Haunted House, was released online in mid-January by the Paris-based small press and label Kiddiepunk. Dubbed an “html novel” and offered as a free download, it consists of seven html files, each of which expands into a long, vertical scroll of animated gifs. You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet’s soul. It has just a few words—the chapter titles and a few subtitles embedded in some of the gifs—but it still very clearly belongs to Cooper’s

A TRAUMATIC EVENT is one that defies our ability to tell what happened and at the same time sets off the desperate compulsion to do so, or at least to try, over and over, however awkward, until a story begins to take hold. A sharp, sudden eruption of violence—a war, an explosion, an attack—both does damage and repairs, by triggering the impulse to explain it, assign it meaning, and make it fit within the wider story we tell ourselves about the worlds in which we live.

The work of Argentine author Silvina Ocampo is rife with unlikely marriages, deadly weddings, and botched birthdays. Ocampo’s funerals are cheerful, her fêtes funereal. “The cemetery looked like a flower show, and the streets sounded like a bell-ringing contest,” she writes of a funeral procession in “Friends,” one of the stories in the newly translated collection Thus Were Their Faces. The mourners “were so enraged they looked happy. On [the] white coffin they had put bright flowers, which were constantly praised by the women…. I don’t think anyone cried.” In another story, “The Photographs,” a convalescent birthday girl dies in

A few months ago, I found myself alone in Seattle, a city I know very little about. Yes, there’s Pike Place Market and the Space Needle and the Rem Koolhaas–designed Central Library. And, OK, I’ll just go ahead and show my age: Nirvana and all those plaid flannel shirts. But what I’m really talking about is where to eat, of course. No matter how much you love your local haunts—and I love more than a few of mine mightily—novelty always counts for something. And it always gives me an appetite.

As I sit down to write this review of a book about persistent French cultural pathologies, Paris has just witnessed a mass march against the government of Socialist president François Hollande. On this self-styled “Day of Wrath,” one contingent of demonstrators sang a Holocaust-mocking ditty titled “Shoah-nanas,” made popular by the comedian Dieudonné; recently, France’s minister of the interior banned Dieudonné’s one-man show Le mur as an affront to “human dignity” for its allegedly anti-Semitic content. Dieudonné’s defenders sometimes claim that his performances are not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist. The Paris demonstrators made it clear, however, that they have little