Super Sad, Super Swedish Love Story
“Watch out,” the group therapist had said, “she’s watching a lot of Bergman.”
Criticism
Review: Chico Buarque's "Spilt Milk"From the Print
Songwriter and novelist Chico Buarque has affected a transition from the Brazilian Bob Dylan to the Brazilian José Saramago or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez. These authors write books where a protagonist’s limp is a metaphor for a country’s crippled left, or a protagonist’s name is a pun about ethnic rivalry…
"Stranger in the Village" & Editor's IntroductionFrom the Print
In “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”…
On Theory and Finance: Review of Berardi’s "The Uprising"
In fact, if contemporary finance is analogous to something in literature, it isn’t symbolist poetry but theory itself. Denationalized, decontextualized, divorced from its origins in philosophy and criticism, theory has assumed totally deregulated positions on everything from literature to politics and beyond…
Mr. Didion
John Gregory Dunne was always the less successful of the pair. The last and most famous role he played was as negative space in his widow’s memoir. For us, he was never there—but then his absence was of immediate emotional enormity. He was a being whose most incentivizing move was to step off camera.
Review: Mark Z. Danielewski’s "The Fifty Year Sword"From the Print
The stitched illustrations, more often abstract than mimetic, make up perhaps the most interesting part of The Fifty Year Sword. They intrude upon the page like the dire ganglia of some malign intelligence.
Review: William Gillespie’s "Keyhole Factory"From the Print
Keyhole’s originality derives from its countless plot strands and typographical experiments, which are deployed to formally mirror its apocalyptic content, creating chaos in terms of structure as well as subject matter…
Selected Movies: Part I
Each day it’s the war drums begin me. // I brush your flamingo of silence I oil my wings. / I limp to my basin and wash.
Review: Orhan Pamuk’s "The Innocence of Objects"
There is a ticket printed in every copy of Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence. The ticket is good for one free admission to the eponymous Museum—a real place, housed in a small building in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul and curated by the author himself…
Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American WritingFrom the Print
When the FBI was fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness.
True North: A Poet's Test
How about this: tonight you’re walking home and you see a man with eight words painted across his chest: truth is not decided by a majority vote True to your nature, you scheme up a story. Centuries ago … Continued
FFFFFUUUUUUU: Rage Comics and Communal Cyber-Authorship
The face grew a history, a body. And it grew its very own audience, transforming all who saw it into a unique author of rage.
The New Russian Realism
This essay introduces the Russian portfolio in the October issue of The American Reader (on newsstands now). The present moment is a fine one for American readers to turn their attention back to Russia—the artistic, rather than the political Russia. In talking … Continued
Review: César Aira's "The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira"From the Print
Mr. Aira continues to assert the interchangeability of the novel and the “miracle cure,” calling attention to the fact that, like quixotic chemists, most writers have encyclopedic aspirations when they start a project, a desire to include a universe of material. But every writer—or miracle doctor—must eventually come back down to earth.
Pokémon, Paradigmatically
If I tell you that Charmander is Norman Mailer, is Jean-Paul Sartre, is that unqueer masculinist with the romantic sweep and the fervent intellect and the uncompromising ambition and the reverence of dominance, I don’t mean to say that Charizard thinks himself a world-rending sexual interloper, only that to me those pixels always will be exactly that.