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.
Rineke Dijkstra's Retrospective: Identity and the Expressive Fallacy
For the past twenty years, Dijkstra has used her camera to investigate the construction of identity. The result is a rich collection of photographs and videos studying both the fragility and resilience of identity.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a White Man
Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker’s pop music critic, often sounds like a guide taking the reader on a tour of some foreign, distant land. “You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob … Continued
The Russian BulletFrom the Print
All access to the long-distance train platforms at the Kazan train station was blocked. Golubev showed his passport to a ruddy, yellow-mustached policeman who had an open laptop hanging at chest-height, like a peddler’s box. Like some nasty iron insect, … Continued
A Conversation with Vanessa Veselka
I sat down with Vanessa Veselka in a small, yet airy, café in New York’s West Village. The dining room was buzzing with chatter and classical music, and every once in a while we had to pause in our conversation … Continued
Angels and Revolution: Vyatka 1923From the Print
A Word or Two from the Lord At the time of the book’s printing, the author of the text was twenty-two years old. He considers himself a decent writer in the primitivist style and currently works in the Vyatka Cheka. … Continued
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.
The History of My Feelings Towards Genre Fiction in 1997 and 2007, Respectively, Presented as German Compound Nouns With Accompanying Translations
Gutenachtgeschichte means a bedtime story and feinschmecker means gourmet