September 2, 2025
It was a kind of last man standing. Or in this case sitting, next to his barrel.
Lisa Borst
All articles by this author
New TV Novels
Not literature, but dramaturgy
It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.
August 4, 2023
Who Was Barbie?
A symposium
My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?
July 20, 2023
It’s always a puzzle, whether to go see aging rockers.
End of the Tour
December 22, 2022
Surely brand activation events weren’t supposed to double as alienation events.
Lisa in Emily in Little Paris
Have you ever read a stranger narrate their divorce in real time?
Live Free or Die
More novels should invent macroeconomic concepts.
The Everything Snore
December 20, 2021
The Everything Snore
Did Eggers mean to write an op-ed, instead of a novel?
Read MoreSeptember 7, 2020
I can’t help but hope for some other, better New York.
68 Jay St. #405, Part I
March 12, 2020
My Lanyarded Brethren
Report from AWP 2020
AWP 2020, sparsely attended compared to the usually robust turnout in years’ past, was spread out on a soft teal green carpet that looked a little like grass. Rows of bright white tables, some empty, others covered in books and candy and tote bags, formed aisle after aisle. Planted in the middle of the broad avenues, where guests wandered, dazed or determined, were old-timey benches presumably for guests to sit and read under the fluorescent lights.
