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A review of Jesse Ball’s novel How to Set a Fire and Why
Jesse Ball’s 2016 novel How to Set a Fire and Why covers a few tumultuous months in the life of Lucia Stanton, anarchist daughter of anarchist parents, now living with her aging anarchist aunt after...
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A review of The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s novel of atavistic...
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man takes place almost entirely over a three seasons in a dilapidated manor somewhere in rural France, sometime near the end of the 20th century. The...
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A review of Dinah Brooke’s excellent cult novel Lord Jim at Home
Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home had been out of print for five decades — and had never gotten a U.S. release — until McNally Editions republished in 2023 with a new foreword by the novelist...
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Horrors and oneiric aberrations | On Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel...
Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus is a 500-page post-apocalyptic, post-modernist, post-exotic epic that destabilizes notions of life and death itself. Radiant Terminus is somehow...
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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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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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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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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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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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