Somehow the lists got switched

so now when darkness trips

the streetlamps in a single flick

I stand on the porch and yell 

for Operation Total Fury

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

You can wake up to someone day after day and still they’ll appear disfigured somehow, pummeled by the early light.  

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There are always reasons one begins to write an endless letter to someone who neither exists, nor ever wanted to. When I started, I was someone, too. Now, to keep going, I sit in the workshop, erasing.

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.

Resisting conformity in any sense, this flawed, disorienting narration is what chips away at the smooth surface of a perfect system, eroding apathy and repression with a persistent and scattered haunting. An endless proliferation of alternative testimonies, then—this is how defiance is exercised.

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

These were the years of Y2K rapture-tripping, before 9/11 shattered the world—the forecasted apocalypse that never came to pass, as opposed to the actual one we didn’t see coming.

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.

They light their soft mustaches with the beating glow of their phones, jingling the hits and misses of a shooting game. They wave them in the air, “Over there,” they yell and disappear. Bugs are erect in the tall grass. I run toward the children, and they toward me, or away, and I run toward them again, barely missing. Their faces gleam green, pink, then red, and purple.