Section
Literary Fiction
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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To Fix the University, Return to Moo U
Every time Sean Carswell teaches Jane Smiley’s “Moo” in his research writing class at California State University, a catastrophe at the fictional Moo University mirrors a crisis within CSU.
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Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”
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Proust Curious: “Swann’s Way”
“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment. And houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
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What’s a Theory to Do?
Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.
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Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda”
“Tears of the Kingdom” lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.
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The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.
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The Writing “I” and the Reading “I”: Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.
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Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty
“It’s still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing anything at all what they’re about to write.”
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Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“Literature has this remarkable, almost miraculous, ability to distill human experience.”
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Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
“What matters to me is fidelity to something else entirely, which is how human beings are and how human beings should be and the chasm between those two things, which I think is what literature is for.”
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Eating Out in the Apocalypse
Can pleasure take place against the backdrop of climate crisis?
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What Do the PDFs Say about This?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow
“What are the systems of power in this fictional context andthe story world I’m making? What are the stakes? What are the values?”
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It’s Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling: Sigrid Nunez’s Animal Novels
Why are animals so central to Sigrid Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction?
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A Translation the Size of the World
“Translators and writers must fight through the “labyrinth of [the] imagination,” find their way through their private language toward a text’s new picture of reality.”
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You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel
“I grew up with this very firm sense that there were multiple places that I could consider a home, rather than homes simply.”
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“I’ve Embraced the Outsider Status”: A Conversation with Francisco Goldman
“That reality, such suffering, and violence, so much evil, was just shattering. Of course I witnessed so much courage too, and goodness, much of it doomed.”
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Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds
“There is a kind of moment of doom when you commit to a character. Because none of my characters are lovely.”
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“The Past Survives in the Telling”: Eight Questions for Esther Kinsky
“I never look for inspiration when I embark on a project. My writing evolves from something I’ve seen, heard outside—never from reading.”
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Subterranean Worlds and Liberatory Futures
The metaphor of the underground as political is rooted in the spatial undergrounds of nineteenth-century America.
