Tag
Literature
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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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“Heated Rivalry” Is the “Moby-Dick” of Canadian Gay Hockey Shows
The literary genre of contemporary MM romance realizes an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being.
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“These Cycles Are Repeating Themselves”: Lara Norgaard on Indonesian History and Translating Political Fiction
“Even characters with completely benign intentions or mildly selfish intentions end up doing pretty bad things because of the institutional structures around them.”
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Julián Delgado Lopera on “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You”
“I am inhabiting many different identities, sometimes multiple identities, constantly. I feel that I’m definitely building on a legacy of Latin American literature and Latino literature in the United States.”
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Rash Reading, Slow Watching with Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman
In the hands of this writer and this filmmaker, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.
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Douglas Stuart and the Struggle to Endure
“Although Cal’s Scotland looks a lot different than Shuggie’s or Mungo’s, his story continues the theme of the first two novels, expanding the hardly fictionalized economic and cultural decimation of Margaret Thatcher’s primacy from the urban to the rural.”
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The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: Who was your favorite teacher and why? “I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire,…
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Xochitl Gonzalez on “Last Night in Brooklyn”
“The last few years in the marketplace have proven that there is a really rabid Latino readership out there for lots of kinds of books. And it’s very exciting.”
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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Victor Frankenstein, ABD
What happens to a young scientist whose primary mentor is an artificial intelligence?
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Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.
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B-Sides: Maurice Gee’s “Going West”
In Going West, Maurice Gee considers national identity, provincialism, and the difficulty of creating an authentic cultural voice in a geographically isolated country.
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Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict”
It’s common for teenage fantasy to find an engine in fiction. But teenage fantasy runs out.
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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What Future for Native Sovereignty?
What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? asks Jon Hickey’s new novel, Big Chief.
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“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín
“Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”
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Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico
“I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident.”
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
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Our Golden Age of Reading (Online)
There is an urgent need for new, more affirmative ways to participate in culture, especially against the ongoing systematic whiteness of publishing and the exclusivity of elite institutions.
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
