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Jangly George Saunders | A review of Tenth of December
Money, With Space Between by John Baldessari “For me, the litmus test is always language,” George Saunders told Charlie Rose in a recent interview. “If the sentences are kind of jangly and interesting,...
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A review of Ishmael Reed’s Christmas satire, The Terrible Twos
Christmas approaches, so let me recommend a Christmas novel for you: Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos (1982). I read it back in unChristmasy August and dipped into it a bit again today, looking for a...
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Thirty-point riff on Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun entertainment that achieves its goals, one of which is not to transcend the confines of its brand-mythos. SW: TFA takes Star Wars itself (as brand-mythos) as its...
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On Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels
“Are we not Men?” — The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (1896) “A country, a people…Those are strange and very difficult ideas.” — Four Ways to Forgivenss, Ursula K. Le Guin (1995) —Each of the...
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The Last Jedi and the Anxiety of Influence
Let me start by erasing my own anxieties about “reviewing” The Last Jedi (2017, dir. Rian Johnson). I saw it over a month ago in a packed theater with my wife and two young children. We loved it. I...
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Omelette à la Alma | Phantom Thread riff
Rambling Preamble Phantom Thread (2017) is the eighth feature film by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. I have been a fan of Anderson’s work since I saw Boogie Nights (1997) in my freshman year...
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Paul Kirchner’s comix collection Awaiting the Collapse reviewed
My review of Paul Kirchner’s collection Awaiting the Collapse is up now at The Comics Journal. From the review: Tanibis has now published Awaiting the Collapse: Selected Works 1974-2014, a gorgeous...
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A review of The Paris Review’s overproduced podcast
In his introduction to the first episode of The Paris Review Podcast, former editor Lorin Stein tells us that we’re going to hear some great writing. He then claims, “what you won’t hear is much in...
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A review of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Narcotics
“The main difficulty with Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz,” writes Soren Guager in his translator’s note for Narcotics, “is that no matter what he was writing, it seems he wished he were writing something...
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Blog about Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
I have just finished Iris Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell. This is the first novel I have read by Murdoch and I now want to read more novels by Murdoch, which I suppose is the best praise I can offer...
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Blog about Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” is a tale about living in radical uncertainty. The story is perhaps one of the finest examples of postmodern literature I’ve ever read....
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Blog about William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Wedding Dance in the Open Air”
William Carlos Williams’ final and posthumous book Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) opens with a cycle of ten ekphrastic poems that describe (and subtly interpret) ten paintings by the...
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Blog about Martin Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy
I watched Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy last weekend and then added it to a list of examples for a much bigger Thing I’ve been working on for a few years (and hence will never likely...
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An interview with the editors of Egress, a new literary magazine devoted to...
Biblioklept: What is Egress? David Winters: Literally: the act or way of leaving a place; an emergence, opening or exit. Egress is also a biannual literary magazine devoted to showcasing the most...
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Blog about the first half of Antoine Volodine’s Writers
Antoine Volodine’s collection of loosely-connected stories Writers (2010; English translation by Katina Rogers, Dalkey Archive, 2014) is 108 pages. I have read the first four of the seven stories...
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A review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1931 book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” has finally been published. The book is based on Hurston’s 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of...
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Blog about reading Middlemarch (and wishing I was rereading Middlemarch)
Detail of a portrait of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) at age 30 by François d’Albert Durade (1804–1886) There should be a word in some language (perhaps not yet invented—word or language) to describe...
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George Saunders’“Little St. Don” and the limits of contemporary satire
George Saunders has a new story called “Little St. Don” in this week’s New Yorker. A satirical hagiography of Donald Trump, “Little St. Don” is a pastiche told in little vignettes, parables roughly...
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Riff on finishing Middlemarch, George Eliot’s novel of consciousness
Detail of a portrait of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) at age 30 by François d’Albert Durade (1804–1886) I finally finished George Eliot’s long and marvelous 1872 novel Middlemarch. When I wrote about...
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Blog about Denis Johnson’s story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”
I finished reading Denis Johnson’s posthumous collection of short stories The Largesse of the Sea Maiden a few weeks ago. I felt a bit stunned by the time I got to the fourth story in the collection,...
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