Perpetual Obscurity: On Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo”
From this angle, it’s almost as if the narrative itself—an ethereal ghost story and a cautionary tale about land grabs—is inconsequential to the book’s real currency: its paradoxically prominent underappreciation.
Spring In Review: 18 False Types
I thought it would be a fun exercise, as a means of assessing this activity over these last few months, to assign Pokemon types to each piece we published.
Parables and the Picaresque: On Djuna Barnes’s “Ryder”
The Ryders are an antithesis of an aristocratic dynasty, closer to modern-day rednecks than the ancestral tradition Barnes pays homage to in her Elizabethan prose.
from “NEARLY EARLY ARTLY NEVER”
the invisible signals (yes) of
a net, of a rain, of a cloud—
Feelings Over Facts: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet Novel
But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love.
Eating Time: On Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women”
Rosa has entered a different understanding of time and its allotments, one removed from the linear progression for heterosexual women as dictated by girlhood, marriage, and childbirth.
from “A Mouth Holds Many Things”
“These works sometimes manifest in multiple forms that cannot be contained by the print page alone.” -Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors
Make It News: On Chris Marker’s “Eternal Current Events”
Marker’s lesson, in part, is that the news is what you make it, but you cannot make it just as you please.
“Paris! Appalachia!” (or How to Live Where You Are)
The beauty Thomas and Spradlin identify in this city is not the architectural grandeur funded by steel robber barons, or city-sanctioned ‘aerosol art,’ but the interplay of the wall and the graffiti; the law and rejection of the law; the memorial and the refusal to pay homage to a memory.
Emptying the Pond to Get the Fish: On Robert Bresson
His films have neither the populist classicism of Francois Truffaut nor the chic experimentalism of Jean-Luc Godard; and unlike with Eric Rohmer, no one is curating Instagram accounts with outfits from his oeuvre.
“Just the Beginning”: Cleveland Police Violence, Surveillance, and The Trial of Fred Evans
Evans’ FBI file is held in a federal facility hundreds of miles from Cleveland, and digitized scans of its components are not available online, making it difficult for the city’s residents to discover for themselves the scope of illegal surveillance their community faced.
Going Wild: On Kathryn Bromwich’s “At the Edge of the Woods” and Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”
At the Edge of the Woods is at once a feminist revenge fantasy, a fabulist tragedy, and a psychedelic paean to the wonders and blessings of the natural world. It might be best summarized, though, as the story of a barren individual—reproductively, but also metaphysically—regaining the ability to feel.
Dickens is Dead, Long Live Dickens: Influence and Imitation in Referential Fiction
We are creatures of reference, engaged in private dialogue with the countless dead, blursed to imitate in small ways and in large our own personal Jesus.
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
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.
Not My First Review: On Honor Levy’s “My First Book”
Far from the “novel in tweets” that critics warned us about, we’ve instead arrived at the primacy of the disembodied voice as a character in of itself, jostling in the void to be the loudest of them all.
from “Delinquents”
I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida.
Ethics of “Serious Culture”: On Greg Jackson’s “The Dimensions of a Cave”
If Jackson’s slim but astonishing oeuvre thus far boasts a leitmotif, it’s the (often male) doubles who embody some iteration of the dichotomy of the radical and the bourgeois—the guy who goes all in for life and love, and the guy who hedges his bets.
Awe Studies: We Look To Be Undone, or At Least Entered
The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.
Last Acts: An Interview
I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.