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How can love be self-ironic? (William T. Vollmann)
I promise you that from the first time she took his hand—the very first time!—he actually believed; she was ready, lonely, beautiful; she wanted someone to love with all her heart and he was the man;...
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“The Central Energy of a Piece Comes from the Sentences”| Jessica Hollander...
I was deeply impressed by the short stories in Jessica Hollander’s In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place (University of North Texas Press). In my review, I wrote that Every story in Jessica...
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“His romantic ancestor, his ancestor of the romantic death”| Bolaño and Borges
Jorge Luis Borges is first mentioned in the sixth paragraph of Roberto Bolaño’s masterful short story “The Insufferable Gaucho.” In this paragraph, the narrator tells us that the story’s hero, an...
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Curation and Creation in Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s Vampire Film
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Only Lovers Left Alive is excellent. Moody, sometimes funny, always gorgeous, and largely plotless, the film centers on two vampires—Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleston...
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The Beautiful Weirdness of Bob Schofield’s The Inevitable June
Bob Schofield’s The Inevitable June continues theNewerYork Press’s dedication to beautiful weirdness. They’ve billed The Inevitable June as “words and art,” which is truth in advertising, yes, but is...
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William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central | A Short Riff on a Long Book
Kilian Eng 1. William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, 811 pages in my Penguin trade paperback edition (including end notes), is a virtuoso attempt to describe or measure or assess or explain or analyze...
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“Go to hell, Roberto”| Roberto Bolaño’s The Unknown University
The Unknown University, Roberto Bolaño’s poetry collection—his complete poems, a bilingual edition, lovely, beautiful, over 800 pages—has been shifted all over my messy house this past month, wedged...
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The Cranky Brilliance of Dwight Macdonald | Masscult and Midcult Reviewed
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (NYRB) collects ten pieces by cultural critic Dwight Macdonald. First published between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the essays here...
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A Riff Jodorowsky’s Dune (And Some Lovely Film Posters)
Fans of Alejandro Jodorowsky and will likely already be familiar with the story that unfolds in Jodorowsky’s Dune, a new documentary by Frank Pavich. The short version: After the success of his...
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A Riff on Stuff I Wish I’d Written About In the First Half of 2014
1. Leaving the Sea, Ben Marcus: A weird and (thankfully) uneven collection that begins with New Yorkerish stories of a post-Lish stripe (like darker than Lipsyte stuff) and unravels (thankfully) into...
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The BFG, Roald Dahl’s Love Letter to His Lost Daughter
Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic The BFG begins with a dedication to the author’s daughter: “For Olivia: 20th April 1955 — 17th November 1962.” If I had noticed the dedication when I first read...
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Snowpiercer Riff
1. Snowpiercer, 2013, directed by Bong Joon Ho and produced by Park Chan Wook, is a sci-fi dystopian set on a mega-train, where the vestiges of humanity survive, protected from the new ice age...
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Kevin Thomas Discusses His Illustrated Book Reviews with Biblioklept
Kevin Thomas’s new book Horn! (from OR Books) collects the book reviews he’s been doing for the past few years at the Rumpus. Kevin reviews new books (and occasionally reissues) in comic strip form....
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Under the Skin Riff
1. I hadn’t read a review of Under the Skin until after I watched it, but I had gleaned an idea of it based on taglines and posters—something like “Scarlett Johansson as a sexy alien seducing men in...
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Bob Schofield Discusses The Inevitable June and His Sad-Cartoon-Apocalypse...
Bob Schofield is a writer and artist. He first showed up on my radar when theNewerYork sent me a digital file of his book The Inevitable June, which I described as “the kind of thing that we need more...
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Riff on Aronofsky’s Noah
1. Noah continues director Darren Aronofsky’s streak of making films that I will never watch more than once. 2. (The film is new on DVD &c.; I dutifully missed in the theater). 3. (Although I did...
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The Inhumanity Museum
Scissors, Richard Diebenkorn Near the end of the first cycle-section of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, protagonist Anna Wulf abandons the pretense of personal narrative in favor of...
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What’s got into you? | Ventriloquism in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden...
In Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, Marion Portmain, a housewife neglected by her husband, resolves that she will begin to live her life with the aim of helping other people. Marion believes...
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Roman Muradov’s Enigmatic Graphic Novella (In a Sense) Lost and Found Reviewed
If you regularly read The New York Times or The New Yorker, you’ve probably already seen Roman Muradov’s compelling illustrations. If you’re a fan, you also know about his strange and wonderful Yellow...
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“The Absence of Any Purpose Is the Starting Point for My Work”| An Interview...
I’ve been a fan of Roman Muradov’s strange and wonderful illustrations for a while now, so I was excited late this summer to get my hands on his début graphic novella, (In a Sense) Lost and Found...
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