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Once Children
ADULTS WHO WERE ONCE CHILDREN tend to agree: we are who we are because of fairy tales. Once upon a time, they were the clearest — and most just-seemin...
Jun 8, 2011
Strange Lights
The originality here lies in the author's ability to reshuffle the materials of pop literature and contemplate them anew.
Jun 8, 2011
Advertising Degree Zero: William Gibson's "Zero History"
This future is a scarier place, by far, than any that SF has yet imagined.
Jun 3, 2011
Boiling Point
The literary world tends to think of genre fiction in very short-hand terms, defined by rigid conventions, styles, plots, and readerships.
Jun 3, 2011
Tall Redhead Syndrome
THE MEMOIR WAS ONCE a venerable literary genre — more compelling and immediate than biography, more inclusive than the novel. There was only one...
Jun 2, 2011
Posthumous
LUMINOUS, PENETRATING, AND UNCANONIZABLE, the writings of 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil were neither originally conceived as books nor...
May 31, 2011
Keys to the City
It is neither an accident nor a disaster that humanity is now, for the first time in its history, a predominantly urban species.
May 30, 2011
Narcocorridos: Ed Vulliamy's "Amexica"
"Few ever stop to ask how many lives just went up a supermodel's nose." Or got smoked in a bowl. Or rolled in a joint.
May 26, 2011
The Middle Years: Michael Cunningham's "By Nightfall"
Ah, Middle Age. Ye despised state.
May 25, 2011
Social Darwinism
The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends.
May 24, 2011
Don't Fence Her In
Since Wyoming is now popularly associated with Dick Cheney and Matthew Shepard's murderers, it’s good to see a more complex portrait of the territory.
May 23, 2011
Some Kind of Animal
It’s a moral dilemma described in devastating images of both his mother’s failures and the author’s own bottomless faults.
May 23, 2011
Channeling Georg Trakl: Christian Hawkey's "Ventrakl"
A "ghostly reanimation" of the poet's textual presence; translation gives way to transposition, to citational graft and recycling.
May 17, 2011
The Bridge
Beauty linked to life and death.
May 13, 2011
The Sign
It is almost entirely abstract.
May 13, 2011
It's Good to be King
King's technical expertise as a writer is almost impossible to ignore, regardless of how one feels about stories involving man-eating oil slicks.
May 12, 2011