With her own Yorkshire Terrier lying beside her, my mother recounted an urban legend of an elegant North Carolinian who had her beloved terrier stuffed when it passed away, so that its stiff little body could sit forever on her Chesterfield sofa.
This rhetoric of violence (“knocked on their heels,” “crushed,” “wiped out,” “eviscerated”) muddled the distinction between mental and physical torment, while failing to do justice to actual suffering. As the careless hyperbole accumulated, it lost its force: eventually, we came to believe that the pain caused by the “Great Recession” was only metaphorical.
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.
As an elucidation of an under-acknowledged, and yet culturally salient, American archetype, Frederick Seidel’s work is invaluable. However, the relevance and potential force of his narrator’s voice is historically tenuous, and there are some luxuries Mr. Seidel’s dapper sinisterio cannot afford.
If the seriousness of a job is measured by the hours worked, why are some of the creative professions still not considered work fit for “an adult”?
Illustrator Daniel Horowitz has become a favorite among publishers and journals. His work has been featured everywhere from The New York Times and Random House, to GQ, The Wall Street Journal, Knopf, and now, The American Reader.
The UNYPL project hinges on the intimate connection between anonymous reader and unnoticed observer.
There’s something striking, and potentially even new, about the constant oscillation between third-person and first-person narration—between the qualifiedly omniscient “he” and the tentative, monological “I”—running through Stephen Dixon’s “Talk”. For example: “The classical music radio station was on when I … Continued
A spectre is haunting “Telegraph Avenue”—the spectre of, in Mr. Chabon’s own phrase, “uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.”
Racter was a computer program designed in 1983 to randomly generate prose and poetry. It was created by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. Selected writings of Racter were published in the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Senior Editor Cat Richardson does a … Continued
