Now that we’ve been in a “golden era” of television for nearly two decades, it’s fair to ask what could come next. Will the long-promised video-game renaissance ever materialize? It’s possible, but one obstacle is that gaming criticism is still in its infancy. “There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing,” Chuck Klosterman lamented in 2006. “And I'm starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice.” Eleven years later, we’re still waiting.

This is, in part, because video-game writers often find themselves on the defensive, having to justify their subject’s

Although it explores a childhood in a northern France blighted by poverty, misery, and prejudice, The End of Eddy differs from the work of Ernaux and Eribon because it is not a return home during a middle age tempered by literary success; it is not replete with emotion recollected in tranquility. It is written in the white heat of recent experience. (Louis was born in 1992.) But it connects with the other two writers in the urgency and honesty in its tone as it attempts to shatter the image of French refined manners and social equilibrium. It connects with Eribon also because it links the

Peter Handke is an acclaimed and prolific author of novels, plays, essays, and poems. A cultural icon of postwar Germany and Austria, he garnered an early reputation as a provocateur with works like Offending the Audience (1966) and Self-Accusation (1966). Handke was internationally acclaimed as a gifted prose stylist, with ruminative, extended sentences that had what John Updike called a “knifelike clarity of evocation.” Later in his career, Handke became embroiled in controversy as he became an outspoken supporter of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars, downplayed the fact that Serbian paramilitaries

For a writer convinced that originality is a myth, Tom McCarthy publishes new work with impressive regularity. The essays in Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish were written between 2002 and 2016 and began life as magazine pieces, reviews, introductions, and lectures. In that time, McCarthy also published four novels (Men in Space, Remainder, C, and Satin Island) and the book-length study Tin-Tin and the Secret of Literature. The essays in this collection mostly continue that book’s concern with two interrelated sets of texts: avant-garde literature and French theory. This makes McCarthy something

In 1954, two dozen people, most of them black, gathered in a small storefront church in Indianapolis. The preacher, a tall, black-haired white man, didn’t launch into a sermon; he asked his congregants a question: “What’s bothering you?”

An elderly black woman raised her hand. She explained that the electricity in her home had been unreliable for months. Exasperated, she’d refused to pay her utility bill until someone fixed the problem, but no one had; now the power company was threatening to shut off electricity to her home. The preacher listened intently. “Let’s write a letter,” he suggested.