An online-only review of books and arguments about books.
July 27, 2026
I loved Gibbons’ stiff sentences and strange tone—at once kitschy, pervy, ridiculous, and tragic.
No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.
June 1, 2026
On television, Texas, and Chuck Klosterman's Football
Klosterman may often be subversive, kind of lazily seditious, but he is, clearly, self-aware about his counterrevolutionary inclinations, accepting and even celebrating football as a stabilizing—some might say paralyzing—force on the American imagination.
May 6, 2026
How can we train ourselves not to translate?
How can we train ourselves not to translate but to imbibe words that we don’t understand? How do we push past obscurity and opacity, without the requisite training in, or knowledge of, other languages?
April 7, 2026
Everything he says is a sort of poem.
By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very concept of a stable narratorial voice.
February 26, 2026
On Pip Adam
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
January 15, 2026
Dunn’s protagonists are almost always isolated and isolating, bristling at connection and rebuking tenderness.
November 18, 2025
Pynchon is pulling his usual moves on something of a speedrun basis.
July 28, 2025
On José Donoso and his translators
Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes. (For now we will spare critics, editors, translators, educators, and, naturally, other writers.) Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?
July 24, 2025
The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.
For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the few employees in Penguin’s 23rd Street office that day looked out their windows to see thousands of New York–area Muslims who’d arrived to protest the publication of The Satanic Verses bowing to Mecca in unison. The management of the company behaved with disgraceful cowardice.
April 29, 2025
It’s convenient enough to judge the present by the standard of culture and assume a response of reflexive pessimism
So, pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of and about intellectuals. Pessimism may be where intellect, left to its own devices, tends to gravitate. But in “Intellectual Identities,” a chapter in the new book, Mulhern sees pessimism as a professional deformation. Intellectuals idealize culture as something that they possess and as a possession that is all the more valuable to them because the society around them ignores it—and it is this self-serving idealization of culture that gives rise to pessimism.
February 13, 2025
What would an authentic spy novel be authentic about?
It hardly matters for this purpose whether the new spy writers, late of their intelligence agencies, can produce basically competent thrillers; they all can. The question is what else they can do, what new spin they can put on the established library of espionage tropes. What value can their past intelligence careers confer? And if that value is bound up, in whatever way, with authenticity, then what is authenticity doing that makes it valuable?
October 23, 2024
Bringing the drug war home
In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms. By killing federal marijuana decriminalization and pushing Carter toward a “zero-tolerance” approach, networks of affluent white parents sponsored the patterns of disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incapacitation of Black and brown youth on marijuana charges that would come to a head under Reagan and Clinton.
