January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
December 20, 2021
The Everything Snore
Did Eggers mean to write an op-ed, instead of a novel?
December 9, 2021
Against the Automatisms of Trauma
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas
December 6, 2021
He was a Black nationalist sympathizer who advocated for integration and a reformist who argued for revolution.
The Journalist and the Movement
In Thrall
How can we get closer to the wounded belly of the world?
Choose your own birth adventure: either you come out of a dark vagina or an iridescent anus. Taking over for Spinoza, the receding figure who is always with us, Kafka laughs at the childishness of a second creation story. In his work, the animal speaks while the human is, ultimately, struck dumb by anal bureaucracies of his own making. Legal fictions estrange humans from each other and create, in the most sensitive souls, fissures that never heal.
In the spirit of what he has called “unhinged generosity” toward the reader, Leyner wants to keep the gravy flowing.
Literary Miniaturist
Man of Scarce Means
I was testing not for accuracy, but possibility
For a long time I considered myself lacking in something essential to the identification of my core self, an English-only, foreign-sounding Igbo person. I wondered what it would mean to rectify that.
L’Autore Invisible
Ralph Ellison in Italian
Translators themselves want to seem inconspicuous, like imperial clerks toiling away in a dark garret, resolving geopolitical issues by working out the finer terms in the draft of a big treaty. The collective need for invisibility creates a language that’s even, parsed out, correct — a language that escorts books out of their country and dresses them up as responsible travelers.
October 19, 2021
A discussion of Everything and Less
Mark McGurl and Mark Greif in conversation
August 3, 2021
The Red Ring and the Wrecking Ball
On Yu Miri
Every two years, when the Olympic institution plants its flag in a new city, speculators from metropolitan Lausanne meet with profiteers in the new athletic colony. They hover over the city map with carving knives, repurposing public spaces and re-zoning residences. Together, for the sake of a two-week event, they take over the territory, line their pockets with public resources, bring in outside workers, and push long-established locals aside.
July 22, 2021
On Janet Malcolm
From that point on she was fully formed, and she could write about whatever she liked
When I read In the Freud Archives for the first time, I understood myself to be looking for facts, dates, quotations—material. The material was there, and like a good nonfiction writer I dutifully underlined and annotated, but I also found that the particulars of the story she told had difficulty competing with the writing she used to tell it.
Why not write, in other words, for Twitter?
