Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the ...
Tag: Paranoia
Sex, Violence, and “The Vegetarian”
The verdict is in. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has not only received glowing praise from British and American literary supplements; it has become the first Korean novel to be shortlisted for a Booker ...
Shakespeare in 2016
Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of ...
Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s ...
Tsuris, FREEDOM, and Guantanamo Bay
Wherever secrecy abrades democracy, tragicomedy builds up. It’s cultural nacre: a way of processing with less pain the absurdist bent in national security. This May, Congress used a chunk of its ...
Let’s All Inhale: Pynchon Goes to the Movies
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson makes a revealing comment about his artistic choices as a director: “If you can convince yourself that there’s some link to reality ...
Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny ...
Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned ...
Pynchon’s Children
The work of Thomas Pynchon has long been synonymous with literary postmodernism, especially the version that involves manic overplotting and paranoid speculation about sinister systems whose names ...
Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in ...
Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington ...