April 22, 2022
Be like little children. Do not be afraid to ask (yourselves and others) what is good and what is bad.
April 21, 2022
Day of the Oprichnik, 16 Years Later
Sorokin deserves credit for bothering to skewer such a marginal figure
This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power.
March 28, 2022
Human Kind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality
Footnotes #1
A drama is being played out in these lines, and I suspect that Eliot is thinking of another text as he recasts the latter’s drama in his own terms. The text is the Bhagavad Gita, which I had read at the age of 17 or 18 in Juan Mascaró’s translation but forgotten by the time I met Gay Clifford. The Gita’s paradoxical thesis about “detached action”—a kind of work that is undertaken for its own sake.
More novels should invent macroeconomic concepts.
The Everything Snore
Shadow and Light
On Deborah Levy
There is something to the way Levy writes that makes one believe she could hear, see, read, or experience anything and say: OK. She offers many interpretations, but few judgments and even fewer conclusions. Her loyalties are total and her betrayals are final.
January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
Why Withdraw?
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.
