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Riff on rereading Gene Wolfe’s postmodern American Gothic ghost novel Peace
I read Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace a few weeks ago and then obsessively reread it. The adverb obsessively in the previous clause refers to a rereading that engendered more rereading, taking more...
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On Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls, an abject post-apocalyptic...
Each time I’ve written about an Antoine Volodine novel, I’ve dithered and dallied and despaired over neatly summarizing his expansive post-exotic project. It seems almost impossible to write about one...
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Bring on the breakdowns | On Nancy Lemann’s cult novel, Lives of the Saints
Let us begin with confession: until a review copy of the new NYRB reissue landed in my mailbox a few months ago, I had never heard of Nancy Lemann or her 1985 debut novel Lives of the Saints. I didn’t...
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“This demon is capitalism. Special Ability: Ravenous hunger”| On Thomas...
Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man is a near-future sci-fi novel working squarely in the cybernoir tradition of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. Like Gibson, Kendall constructs a world...
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On Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry...
Robert Coover’s sophomore novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is in print again via New York Review Books, with a new introduction by Ben Marcus. First published in...
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Miserable comforters are ye all | On George Saunders’ hollow new novel Vigil
George Saunders’ latest novel Vigil is told primarily from the perspective of a ghost, Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit who has resisted elevation to up there in order to remain on Earth, where she guides...
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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest
A note to readers new to Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of...
View ArticleLet me tell you about the nap
2025 was in several ways one of the more fucked up and challenging years of my life. (This sentiment might be familiar to you and yours and many others.) But it was the year I finally learned to take a...
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The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s post-convenience novel of abject gags and...
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: The Pisstown Chaos is an improbably perfect and beautiful name for a novel. If you don’t like the title, The Pisstown Chaos isn’t for you. It is a foul,...
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Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket
I posted these notes on Thomas Pynchon’s 2025 novel Shadow Ticket on Biblioklept in October and November of 2025. They appear here in basically the same form. Let’s start with the epigraph:...
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Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a perfect novella
The Race, 1942 by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) With blunt grace, Denis Johnson navigates the line between realism and the American frontier myth in his perfect novella Train Dreams. In a slim 116...
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a frenetic, vital...
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another takes Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and sets it ablaze, reshaping its abstract paranoia and fractured narrative into something both deliriously...
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A review of Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field towards the...
In Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, an unidentified blight spreads from the south of England, driving refugees northward. Our hero, a girl named Flo, walks...
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A put-upon frogman with too little oxygen vs. his angry father in Markus...
The hero of Markus Werner’s 1985 novel The Frog in the Throat is Franz Thalmann, a disgraced, divorced, defrocked clergyman, who lives ashamed and diminished, yet nevertheless resilient in a...
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Thirteen ways of looking at a portal | A review of Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania
Debbie Urbanski’s new collection Portalmania is a metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror where portals don’t offer escape so much as expose the fractures beneath family, love, and...
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Briana Loewinsohn’s graphic novel Raised by Ghosts turns absence into...
A decade ago I finally tossed out most of the contents of an old shoebox crammed with high-school nostalgia. Notes from ex-girlfriends, summer postcards, flyers from local shows, a handful of choice...
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Maggie Umber’s Chrysanthemum Under the Waves blends horror, surrealism, and...
Maggie Umber calls the nine pieces collected in Chrysanthemum Under the Waves “comics,” so I will call them comics too. The term “comics” has long encompassed a wide range of visual storytelling...
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Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate
1, It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year. 2, What...
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Charles Burns’ Final Cut explores the irreal reality of artistic ambition
Charles Burns’ latest graphic novel Final Cut tells the story of Brian, an obsessive would-be auteur grappling with an unrealized film project. Brian hopes to assemble his film — also titled Final Cut...
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Man is doomed to constantly fabricate new agonies for himself | On Dino...
Two years after it was first published in Italy, Dino Buzzati’s 1960 novella Il grande ritratto got its first English translation by Henry Reed under the title Larger Than Life. This year, NRYB issued...
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