Writing

Reviews

Featured
I Decided To Hold Onto It: On Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists”
Emily Alexander
I Decided To Hold Onto It: On Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists”
Emily Alexander

Chekhov’s gun isn’t always firing; sometimes it’s just the small, insignificant moments that happen in the meantime, described with clarity and grace, pinpricks of tenderness, the levity of a vignette that passes, that means nothing, that means everything, that exists.

Emily Alexander
Doubled Visions: On Heather Christle’s “In the Rhododendrons”
Rachel Trousdale
Doubled Visions: On Heather Christle’s “In the Rhododendrons”
Rachel Trousdale

The result is a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other. 

Rachel Trousdale
Michel Houellebecq Explains Himself: on Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation”
Jason Rogers
Michel Houellebecq Explains Himself: on Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation”
Jason Rogers

None of the author’s controversies have been as bizarre as the one he finds himself in presently, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, circles back to his preoccupation with sex.

Jason Rogers
Back to Normal: Hollinghurst's Late Style
Peter Huhne
Back to Normal: Hollinghurst's Late Style
Peter Huhne

If a shared appreciation of culture is a means of expressing these desires covertly, Our Evenings suggests that it can also prove treacherous.

Peter Huhne
Decisions, Decisions: On Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s “What Are Children For?”
Sophia Stewart
Decisions, Decisions: On Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s “What Are Children For?”
Sophia Stewart

I see nothing controversial in the authors’ core argument: that it’s not anti-feminist to wonder whether to have children, and that women who are ambivalent about the question should address it in a timely, direct, and collaborative manner.

Sophia Stewart
Inhuman Intelligence: on “The Automatic Fetish” and “The MANIAC”
Jordan Ecker
Inhuman Intelligence: on “The Automatic Fetish” and “The MANIAC”
Jordan Ecker

Labatut and Best both fear this outcome. But Labatut does not realize we already live in a world governed by an alien intelligence.

Jordan Ecker
A Snail’s Pace Suits Me Fine: On Mario Levrero’s “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine”
Colm McKenna
A Snail’s Pace Suits Me Fine: On Mario Levrero’s “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine”
Colm McKenna

Levrero’s characters often uncover something long neglected, or turn inward in some other way. Consequently, the protagonists in these stories are seemingly at odds with their reality.

Colm McKenna
Every Little Thing: On Simon Wu’s “Dancing on My Own”
Anabelle Johnston
Every Little Thing: On Simon Wu’s “Dancing on My Own”
Anabelle Johnston

I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel stripped of by histories of immigration and assimilation and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t make silk less pleasurable or persimmons less delicious.

Anabelle Johnston
Articulations: On Eleni Stecopoulos’s “Dreaming in the Fault Zone”
Megan Jeanne Gette
Articulations: On Eleni Stecopoulos’s “Dreaming in the Fault Zone”
Megan Jeanne Gette

Can there be a reparative mode of reading the earth, Dreaming seems to ask, that draws us into an epoch of the geopathic? Or a mode of repair that does not draw from the paradigm of work and working?

Megan Jeanne Gette
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill

While she positions herself as an inside critic fed up with the excesses of the left, and as someone who embraces Marxist ideas herself, her recent work demonstrates serious confusion about the nature of exploitation, one of the most basic Marxist concepts.

Tim Gill

Essays

Featured
The Night Side of Nature: On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu”
Brianna Di Monda
The Night Side of Nature: On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu”
Brianna Di Monda

Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness.

Brianna Di Monda
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

Philip Harris
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller

As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Lucy Schiller
On Beauty and the Cleveland Museum of Art
Abigail Weil
On Beauty and the Cleveland Museum of Art
Abigail Weil

Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.

Abigail Weil
A Monument to Workers’ Thoughts: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kathë Kollwitz at MoMA
Rachel Horowitz
A Monument to Workers’ Thoughts: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kathë Kollwitz at MoMA
Rachel Horowitz

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

Rachel Horowitz
Bone Deep: Surface and Substance in May/December
Anna Krauthamer
Bone Deep: Surface and Substance in May/December
Anna Krauthamer

In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

Anna Krauthamer
Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein
Samir Chadha
Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein
Samir Chadha

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

  1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

  2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Samir Chadha
Ancient Jars
Leo Kim
Ancient Jars
Leo Kim

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

Leo Kim
Money, Merit, and the Economy of Favors: Three Proposals to Improve Class Diversity in the Literary Community
Brandon North
Money, Merit, and the Economy of Favors: Three Proposals to Improve Class Diversity in the Literary Community
Brandon North

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

Brandon North
Paris, of, Appalachia (or How to Bet on Two Words and Lose)
Dani Lamorte
Paris, of, Appalachia (or How to Bet on Two Words and Lose)
Dani Lamorte

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

Dani Lamorte

Interviews

Featured
Language as Rebellion: Yuri Herrera in Conversation with Daisuke Shen
Daisuke Shen
Language as Rebellion: Yuri Herrera in Conversation with Daisuke Shen
Daisuke Shen

Because even if you're speaking about ghosts, you're always speaking about yourself—about your neighbors and about your own history.

Daisuke Shen
The Secret City: Aaron Lange on the 1970s Cleveland Punk Scene
Andrew Worthington
The Secret City: Aaron Lange on the 1970s Cleveland Punk Scene
Andrew Worthington

Lange presents a beautiful and moving depiction of Laughner as a tragic poet amidst the end of the industrial empire of which Cleveland and Northeast Ohio were a microcosm.

Andrew Worthington
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams

I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.

Evan Williams
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman

This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.

Nik Slackman
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas

What had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade? 

Tim Thomas
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman

In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, technology scholar Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab and former green software researcher at Intel, explores the precarity of our data and digital selves.

Jacob Bruggeman
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis

The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.

Sam Venis
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons

I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.

Jackson Frons
The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein
Emma Glenn Baker
The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein
Emma Glenn Baker

Because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.

Emma Glenn Baker
The Whisper Network Electrified: An Interview with “Mike Antenna”
Suspended Reason & RIP DCB
The Whisper Network Electrified: An Interview with “Mike Antenna”
Suspended Reason & RIP DCB

The new view of intelligence work is all about creating information, spreading and disrupting narratives. It’s no longer about keeping accurate records or models of the world; it’s about creating a world.

Suspended Reason & RIP DCB

Excerpts

Featured
from “See Friendship”
Jeremy Gordon
from “See Friendship”
Jeremy Gordon

The student loan bubble? Tensions with China? The hollowing of rural America? The collapse of the reasonable center? Medical debt, race relations? My God, the climate crisis, and on top of all that the looming threat of another four years, which, all liberal hysteria aside, our enemies in the Kremlin were probably planning right this moment? It added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up.

Jeremy Gordon
from “I want to start by saying”
Samuel Ace
from “I want to start by saying”
Samuel Ace

I want to start by saying that in the fifties and sixties Jews and Blacks moved into Shaker Heights.

I want to start by saying that the press said they were welcomed.

I want to start by saying they were not welcomed.

Samuel Ace
from “Gloom 11: Epilogue”
Jake Reber
from “Gloom 11: Epilogue”
Jake Reber

Smoke. Morphine induced reflective flashback. Restricted area. Observe > feel > transcribe > reflect > repeat. Hospital bed. Breaking news. Large blast. Conspiracies. Message boards. Static. Dread. Cybrids. Phantom limb.

Jake Reber
from “A Park at the Edge of the Country”
Austin Araujo
from “A Park at the Edge of the Country”
Austin Araujo

like the scholarly work
I’d neglected
before the accident
with its long digressions
on the epistemology
of hero worship.

Austin Araujo
excerpt from “Lonesome Ballroom”
Madeline McDonnell
excerpt from “Lonesome Ballroom”
Madeline McDonnell

I didn’t remember ever actually introducing myself to Lizzie, didn’t remember telling the barmaid about my tenuous tenure in what passed in X for an art world, though I must have, at some point, because there she always was, hovering stern and sudden above, everything she wasn’t asking me aloud blaring through her glare.

Madeline McDonnell
from “Flag”
Imani Elizabeth Jackson
from “Flag”
Imani Elizabeth Jackson

I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.

Imani Elizabeth Jackson
from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
Jonathan Foiles
from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
Jonathan Foiles

I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.

Jonathan Foiles
from “Notation”
Jordan Dunn
from “Notation”
Jordan Dunn

The buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor.

Jordan Dunn
from “Anamnesis”
Caroline McManus
from “Anamnesis”
Caroline McManus

Can an object—in the form of language—seeping out of these cracks elucidate some semblance of a truth?

Caroline McManus
from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong