I CRY EVERY TIME I FINISH SULA. This is not due to any lack of acquaintance with the novel’s tragic ending. Toni Morrison’s second published work of fiction was assigned reading in several courses I took during my studies. I have taught Sula at least once a year for the past ten years. On vacations, […]
IT’S NOT SAID often enough, if it’s said at all, that avant-garde American poetry is experiencing a renaissance—an overbroad, obnoxious term that nonetheless fits the scale of the moment. For the early part of the twenty-first century, unless you really paid attention to the little magazines and small presses or, later, to Tumblr, you might […]
IN 1999, AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE, ANTHONY BOURDAIN had all but given up hope that he would ever be recognized as a major talent in anything. For the man who would soon become famous for courting extremes, this mediocrity was a kind of torture. After a promising start at the Culinary Institute of America, […]
THE MEME, IF THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO CALL IT, caught my attention sometime back in 2018 in the middle of Trump One, when things still were making a modicum of sense. Underneath a photo of the great man, smirking like a second-string high school quarterback who has just gotten his hand in a […]
WE’RE REPEATEDLY TOLD THAT WE’RE LIVING THROUGH THE END-TIMES, crushed by conspiracy theories, crypto, Palantir, Nick Fuentes, Libs, gooning, and fascism. Every day unleashes a sparkling new hell, which makes for good headlines. Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel, Flat Earth, conjures up and satirizes this doomsday present through the POV of a young woman. She’s […]
IT’S LATE AUGUST AND I’M WALKING THROUGH THE PASSAGE DES PANORAMAS, the oldest covered arcade in Paris, simply because Lucien Chardon passes through it with Étienne Lousteau in Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions, the best novel ever written, which I finished shortly before arriving in the city. I’m carrying a copy of Splendeurs et misères […]
LYDIA DAVIS INTRODUCED her brand of emotional vertigo in the mid-1980s, with short stories that could fairly be called flat but never cold. In her fiction and translation work—both lifelong gigs for her—Davis revises drafts heavily. Her patience has given us a catalogue of everyday American surrealism that is hers alone. Here is a story […]
THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN DICTATED a couple thousand years ago by an Indian guru named Padmasambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was known as Bardo Thödol or The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo until its first English language translation in 1927 by Walter Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist from New Jersey. Thödol means “the […]
ALTHOUGH NONE OF HER BOOKS could be said to have happy endings, I have never until now thought of Chris Kraus as a writer of tragedies. As is the case with many of her admirers (and just as many of her detractors), my attention has long been snagged on her work’s thornier, more titillating qualities: […]
BIG KISS, BYE-BYE, Claire-Louise Bennett’s third book, begins in the long drawn out wake of a breakup. “Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore,” goes the opening line, told from the perspective of the unnamed protagonist. “I’ll be in the woodshed in L——.” The narrator, a writer in her late forties, is […]
THE PATERNITY OF Hicks McTaggart—defender of dames, dodger of bombs, twirler of spaghetti, the amiable behemoth hero of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket who prowls the streets of Depression-era Milwaukee—is a question his author leaves open. His mother, Grace, and her sister, Peony, “grew up in the Driftless Area, a patch of Wisconsin never visited by […]
THERE IS VERY LITTLE CHANCE that I can be convinced academia is sexy, but I could be persuaded to think it’s funny. From a distance I have gleaned campuses to be tiny fiefdoms in which everyone takes turns believing that they are in charge, or should be, or will be soon. This is great material […]
THE UNCANNY fertility and invention displayed by the writing of Muriel Spark has been a consistent source of awed bemusement. Gabriel Josipovici, an experimental writer quick to identify Spark as a rare British predecessor, called her novels—she published twenty-two in all—“a joy to read and a nightmare to talk about.” Renata Adler, in the Spark […]
DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American […]
JORDAN CASTRO FIRST CAME across my radar in 2011 when he live streamed himself “earnestly” attempting to detach his penis from his body with his bare hands. At the time, Castro was an eighteen-year-old poet and contributor to HTMLGiant, the blog/discussion board where the alt-lit scene bloomed. I remember watching through cracked fingers, unsure if […]
Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, $29)—his fourth book of fiction—is an ambitious departure from his previous work. The novel takes up timely and fraught questions of representation within a culture industry hostile to idiosyncratic depictions of Black life that do not adhere to predictable narratives. At turns satirical and humane, the novel follows the romantic […]
THE NIGHT AFTER I finished reading The Möbius Book, I woke up from a terrible dream. In this dream I had been shrunk back to twenty-three years old, back to a uniquely terrible relationship with a man. He began to argue with me, this man, on account of the fact that he no longer enjoyed […]
WHEN LEIF RANDT’S novel Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County came out in 2011, it was unique in the German literary world. Randt was one of the few German authors writing what is now commonly called speculative fiction—not hard sci-fi but not realism, either—and in Berlin, where I lived at the time, it generated enough buzz […]
ONCE, AS A CHILD, I had visions. This took place in a children’s hospital decorated with murals of sea creatures. During the several hours I was in surgery, they had come alive. An octopus crawled along the plaster. A sea dragon undulated. I might have been frightened, except the ocean in the walls simply confirmed […]
At once a domestic novel and a spy thriller, Susan Choi’s Flashlight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) spans the second half of the twentieth century, at least, and takes us to Japan, North Korea, and the United States. When Anne and Serk, the couple at the center of the book, meet in the mid 1960s, […]
