Books about law are often utilitarian. But perhaps sometimes we should embrace sublime uselessness.
Tag: Fantasy
Toxic Masculinity, Spectral Homosexuality
The secret of the Western—as Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” shows—is that its mythology nurtures a queer fantasy, hiding in plain sight.
To Suffer a Witch in “WandaVision”
Anyone who has been called a bitch-witch might have predicted the show’s big twist: there is absolutely no right way to wield your power.
A Labyrinth for Our Time
What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound?
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We're in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”
“Echo” and the Problem of Chess Problems
When looking at both art and life, we recognize patterns and then we learn what those patterns signify.
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
Games for a Fallen World
Last year, Nintendo released its latest gaming console, a nimble and versatile product appropriately named the Switch, which transforms from transportable LCD tablet to a standard controller with a simple click. Released alongside the ...
B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate ...
In Memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin
If Ursula K. Le Guin’s death left only a small hole in the larger world, it poked a large hole in my smaller one. I was glad, of course, that her praises were quickly ...
Coming of Age with Philip Pullman
People really like Philip Pullman’s characters. One of my best friends gave his daughter the middle name Lyra after Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of Pullman’s His ...
Jane Austen Meets Sci-Fi
After two hundred years of being known as a genius, Jane Austen is now a brand, a marketing phenomenon. According to Wikipedia—so this is more universally acknowledged than necessarily true—in 2015 ...
Politics and Play in Spain Today
Juan José Millás’s Desde la sombra (From the Shadow) is a short novel, not yet translated into English, about alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, and the power of ...
Miéville’s Surreal Weapons
In his rambling 2011 photo-essay “London’s Overthrow,” composed in the lead-up to the London Olympics, China Miéville takes his reader through the ever-changing, history-drenched streets of his beloved city ...
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the ...
Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”
This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the ...
Am I Not a Dragon and a Brother
Here’s what everyone will tell you about the award-winning Temeraire series that Naomi Novik has just completed: it’s the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15)—with dragons. The series has expressive, pitch ...
Bro Uprising
With Pierce Brown’s lately concluded Red Rising trilogy, the phenomenon of the blockbuster Young Adult dystopian novel that brought us The Hunger Games and Divergent has reached its eye-popping ...
Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By all means, celebrate the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by rereading or finally reading the novel and its sequel ...
How to Write about Videogames
I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” ...