by The Editors
January 27, 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that…
June 9, 2025
What do we mean when we call a novel “urgent?” Presumably, we do not mean that the novel urges us to commit a certain act, or even to align with an ideology or support a particular cause. Even the most overtly political fiction that I’ve enjoyed — say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — never caused me…
by Adam Pearson
June 6, 2025
I can remember the first time I really understood the millennial obsession with authenticity. It was the summer of 2016, a few months after I moved to Seattle, as the bright lights of a newly urban existence began to dim in the rhythms of the day to day, and the lingering jokes about gentrifying hipsters…
June 4, 2025
If you are a diligent reader of the novels flowing out of the Anglosphere for the last five or ten years, there are a number of reasons why French literary culture might strike you as rather strange. First, French writers seem to be unusually responsive to current events: while we were all writing our neat…
by Mo Diggs
June 2, 2025
Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the…
by Vanessa Ogle
May 31, 2025
Sean was ten when it happened. It was a memory that he swallowed. Instead of passing through him, it became another heart. It was there, alert and active, with him always. He thought this obsession, his acceptance of his father’s worst moment along with his commitment to remembering it, was proof he loved Daddy most….
May 31, 2025
Major Arcana is possibly the greatest title of the twenty-first century, depending on how you pronounce it. Major Ar-kay-nuh with an Arkansas accent won’t do, nor will trying to rhyme it with Arkansas, either. And as for the German My-orr, let us bid it a preventative Auf Weidersehen. The only way to pronounce it is Major Ar-caw-nuh,…
May 28, 2025
Theodoric abruptly drew his broadsword and struck Odoacer with such ferocity that it cleaved him from shoulder to thigh in a single slice. “The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body,” he joked, standing over the barbarian King of Italy, the man who put to bed the Western Roman Empire. Carved to a…
May 26, 2025
In the issue dated September 13, 2001, Newsweek magazine ran a photograph of a firefighter carrying a young girl to safety. “Horror at Home,” the caption read, a simple and stark evocation of the tragedy that had occurred two days earlier, when the Twin Towers were struck by two airplanes. The Towers collapsed entirely, blanketing…
by Stuart Ross
May 23, 2025
A narrative strategy of ambivalence is often a sure bet in the realistic novel. Gustave Flaubert complained that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, didn’t need to “make observations” about chattel slavery in the United States, she only needed to “depict it: that’s enough.” Flaubert’s observations still inspire writers and critics who argue the author…