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More Bolaño: A review of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Spirit of Science Fiction
Roberto Bolaño died at the young age of 50 in 2003, just as his work was beginning to gain a wider audience and broader critical acclaim. It wasn’t until after his death that his work was published in...
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A riff on starting Robert Coover’s first novel, Origin of the Brunists
Origin of the Brunists is Robert Coover’s first novel. First published in 1966, this long novel tells the story of an apocalyptic religious cult that forms around the sole survivor of a mining...
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Blog about the last three scenes of True Detective Season 3
I enjoyed Season 3 of True Detective, and thought the season finale, which aired last night on HBO, was especially good. Like the season as a whole, this eighth episode, “Now Am Found,” was rich, sad,...
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A review of Lord, João Gilberto Noll’s abject novel of dissolving identity
João Gilberto Noll’s short novel Lord is an abject and surreal tale of madness. Madness is perhaps not the correct term, although it does point towards Lord’s gothic and abject modes. Perhaps it’s...
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A review of Ishmael Reed’s sharp satire The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Ishmael Reed’s 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a sharp, zany satire of US culture at the end of the twentieth century. The novel, Reed’s fourth, is a sequel of sorts to Mumbo Jumbo...
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A review of Taking Care, Joy Williams’ debut short story collection
Let’s begin with a paragraph from Joy Williams’ story “Winter Chemistry.” Let’s begin with this paragraph because I think it makes a better argument for reading Joy Williams’ story “Winter Chemistry”...
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A review of Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower
Cover art for Parable of the Sower by John Jude Palencar Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower imagines what a radical affirmation of life might look like set against a backdrop of...
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Post script as self portrait, or, Throwing out a bunch of old magazines
In February of 2002, three friends came to visit me and my girlfriend in our tiny apartment in Tokyo. We had been living there for just a few months, since September of 2001. I was ostensibly teaching...
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Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a postmodern fantasy novel that...
Marlon James’s novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a postmodern fantasy that takes place in medieval sub-Saharan Africa. Set against the backdrop of two warring states, the North Kingdom and the South...
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Uncertainty of the real | Blog about the first third of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice
The first three words of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice are “I was lost,” a simple declaration that seems to serve as a mission statement for the next 60 odd pages. I read these 60 odd pages (63, to be...
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Increasingly derealized | Blog about the second third of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice
La Victime est reine (The Victim Is Queen), 1963 by Leonor Fini In my last blog on Anna Kavan’s 1967 cult novel Ice, I focused on the book’s first third (the first five chapters), focusing in...
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An area of total strangeness | Blog about the final third of Anna Kavan’s...
Bondage by Leonor Fini. Part of Fini’s illustrations for a 1962 edition of Pauline Réage’s novel The Story of O. I wrote about the first third of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice here and then wrote about...
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An interview with Margaret Carson about translating Remedios Varo’s Letters,...
As a huge fan of Remedios Varo’s art, I was thrilled last year when Wakefield Press published Margaret Carson’s Letters, Dreams and Other Writings. I reached out to Margaret, who was kind enough to...
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A review of Pierre Senges’ confounding novel Geometry in the Dust
Describing Geometry in the Dust is a challenge. I’ve deleted so many openings now and my frustration is mounting: so some very basic description: Geometry in the Dust is a novel by the French author...
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Blog about Anna Burns’s maybe-horror/maybe-comedy novel Milkman
Anna Burns’s third novel Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize and was reviewed in a number of prominent publications. It hardly needs my recommendation at this point, but I do recommend it: It’s...
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For David Berman
I wish David Berman were still alive. That’s the thing that I want to say. I’m sitting here on a black leather couch with scratched arms—the couch’s arms are scratched not mine, scratched by a cat...
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A review of Keiler Roberts’ Rat Time
Let’s start with the title. Rat Time is a great title. What is Rat Time? Rat Time is a graphic novel—or graphic autofiction, or graphic discursive memoir—I’m not really sure what genre it fits into,...
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A review of Alfred Döblin’s turbulent, encyclopedic riot of a novel, Berlin...
“Unbe-fucking-lievable,” interjects the ominvalent narrator of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz at one point. I’m not sure if the original German (Ist gar nicht zu glauben) conveys...
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Ratner’s Star | On Uncut Gems
Frenetic, chaotic, and unceasingly energetic, the Safdie brothers’ 2019 film Uncut Gems plays out like a two-hour panic attack. Uncut Gems opens in the turbulent aftermath of a mining accident. An...
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“That nevertheless sky we all live below”| A review of Kyle Coma-Thompson and...
926 Years is a collaboration between Kyle Coma-Thompson and Tristan Foster. The book consists of 22 stories, each a paragraph long, and each paragraph no longer than the front and back of a 4.5″ x 7″...
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