Laughter & Women: "A Doll's House" at BAM
The laughter said: this is where the play ends, but that’s fine, because I know what happens next. There is no need for you to finish your story, because I can finish it for you.
The Name of the Critic: On “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life”
Too often, modern academics approach Benjamin as a Rorschach test, gazing at the text and thereby gauging their own predilections toward Marxism, poststructuralism, sociology, Jewish mysticism, urban theory, or modern-day Dadaism. No thinker in modern history is so overdetermined by the pet theories and partial readings of others…
Life Sentences: Diagramming #Hashtags
One major obstacle prevents me from diagramming my favorite tweets so as to admire their structure: I don’t know what to do with the hashtags. How do I begin to approach, for example, the unsubtle irony of “#RIPNelsonMandela shawshank redemptionis my favourite movie”?
Paranoid Narcissism: What Dostoevsky Knew About the Internet
Enter the double: the curated profile, the version of you that bears all your identifying information—name, clothes, job, appearance, place of birth—but whose social grace is impeccable, whose interests are noble and fascinating, whose biography is impressive yet humbly presented, whose comments are edited for maximum wit.
Micro-review: On Simone Kearney's "Middlemarch"
Berl’s Poetry Shop located in Dumbo has emerged from nowhere it seems to become one of the most exciting venues for poetry in New York City. No easy feat considering the long-standing wealth of options. Owned and operated by poets Jared White and Farrah Field, Berl’s features an exhaustive inventory of poetry titles and chapbooks from small presses and independent publishers…
Four Short Essays From "The Hard Problem"
One time I was in therapy for being sad, and while I was there I learned about The Power of Positive Thought. I know this sounds like magic and/or fake and/or antithetical to the open-eyed truth telling to which we’ve all dedicated ourselves as writers, but if you would like to not kill yourself after years and years of sitting at a desk with little or nothing to show for it, it’s a really great option…
Micro-review: On Lonely Christopher's "Death & Disaster Series"
The result is a sharply integrated and commanding whole, a triptych of love, poetry and grief orchestrated around the time in which each section was written: the June before, the August during, and the months after his mother’s death.
An Interview with Karen Joy Fowler
I’ve long felt that reality is so strange that realism really isn’t up to the task of adequately presenting it. The world is a whole lot more horrible than I imagined as a child. But it is also considerably funnier. I try to make do with that…
Imagined Conversations (3.10.14)
A: The smell of blood was in the air, and there were lots of people crying…
B: It’s an issue for sure…
A: I was forced to yell. The world cannot just allow this to happen. I had no other weapon to resort to, no other means to resort to, but to speak publicly and get attention that way.
B: You, sir, were not even truthy.
A Zombie Novel Without Zombies: An Interview with Bennett Sims
I wanted my characters to be able to argue about undeath without ever having to actually run from or fend off the undead… Since the characters don’t feel threatened by the undead, their conversations are free to shift away from the apocalyptic logistics of most zombie fiction (‘How do we survive?’ ‘How do we kill them?’ ‘How do we know who’s been bitten?’) to a more passive fascination with zombies’ creatureliness (‘What do they remember?’ ‘Are they conscious?’ ‘What is it like to be them?’).