When you grow up alongside a writer and see them change and rearrange and deliver a new object still dripping sweat, that object looks different than if you were merely recovering it from the long march of literature by the no-longer living.

The text is interactive, necessitating the intervention of the reader for categorization of its entropic structures. Genre inflects, demands, and manages expectations anew: it’s a goddamned virus.

Darras’ poetry may long for the alleged poetic horizon from which waves—and, indeed, shades—emanate but, in its subtle (if finless) wisdom, remains coastal, content to let lyric fall tame upon the sand.

At this year’s end, we present its distillation or digital imprint: every wavy line from our homepage arranged in chronological order, a kind of cento, list, monument, calendar.

The new issue is hot off the presses. It smells ripe, it wears leather, and it will get angry if you walk behind it.

Both women were prone to tragedy, exceptionally talented prose stylists, and flagrant pessimists, and their co-written cookbook provides a welcome glimpse into the charmingly caustic conversational style that made them social centerpieces of their era.

The American chestnut gave me a chance to see something that actually was more or less gone from the natural world, to reach back into the distant past and get a sense of what climate destruction might rob from us again and again.

The future novel resides with the fans. It will not be written from above or outside. Literature belongs to the davenport.

To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.

Books that might be considered staples of the Midwest today were actually bundled into the revolt from the village, seen as mocking the region.

Culpability is offloaded onto the very idea of science itself: unfeeling, inhuman, inevitable. These warnings do not allow for human ingenuity or variety of thought; they cannot imagine another way. But it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

Such as, I keep misreading these preceding instances of the term “a****-g****” as “agnès-varda.”

Supposing maybe this is all anybody ought to be asking.

To squabble over genre would be to take away from the very potent delight of these kinds of tales: a capacity to traverse an enormous affective range, to play lightly at the surface of life and to sink to tragic human depths.

The show narrates queer and trans characters in ways that negate old tropes about being stuck in the closet in backwards small-town America. They are simply unglamorous, everyday people.

I am coming back to America. I am trying to figure out the act of being American again. There are two things I am now prepared to admit I was wrong about in relation to this: Lana Del Rey’s new Americana songbook, and Ansel Adams’s photographs of America.

When an American looks at British Literature, we see what we are not. But we also see what we are. There’s a reason Shakespeare, with his corrupt kings and upstart heroes, is so often presented as integral to the American spirit.

Every day I am more interested in the social and aesthetic lives of video games, and where those games might intersect with literature and the world.

We need a new figure to carry on the project of the cyborg, to stir our imaginations and encourage blasphemous thought. A hot-blooded thing formed from an ever-hotter world. Part animal, part man, part machine. Entirely monstrous.

It is considered unprofessional. It feels bad. It is a bad look. How is writing supposed to feel, supposed to look?

The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.