Revolution Man: On Mark Z. Danielewski, His Unfinished Novel, and His Father’s Ghost(s)

Mark Z. Danielewski started outlining his third novel in 2006 and these were its major characteristics: The novel would be 27 volumes long (the number is important). Each volume would have 880 pages (also important). By releasing roughly two volumes a year, for a dozen years, it would serialize the story of nine central characters converging in Los Angeles around a few central mysteries. It’d be sprawling and brainy and challenging like his first two novels except this time he’d be doubling down on narrative. He wanted to make something propulsive. Almost addictive. Like a TV series! The sort of prestige show that seemed to be blowing up into something of a phenomenon at the time, 2006-08ish. Remember: The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire were just ending. Lost was becoming a sensation. Dexter, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and True Blood were just debuting. Critics went from calling it a second golden age of television to the golden age. Not because the shows were edgier, sexier, and more cerebral than ever (though they were), but because the discourse about these shows was wider, better, and more accessible than it had ever been. Social media had turned the proverbial “water cooler” into a worldwide well.

Blossom and Portraits: New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review

You can change / with your last breath / and you can change / with your last breath / writes Bertolt Brecht / and in the book of change / you turn the page and turn / the page until there you are / a bus a train a short walk / into your life but what / you feel is that you might be / dying as whatever it is / that desires in you / that hopes that moves / has slid the brightness up / on your morning window / a cloud down on your mind. / With a whistle / only you can hear / an invisible leash and collar / fit for your neck a label / for your name you are / its dog now up too early / now somehow on a run. / A run?—you who hates / to run asks—me?

Watching Another Man Drown: On Alex Kazemi’s New Millennium Boyz

There’s this David Letterman line that sometimes runs through my head. It’s from a 1987 episode with Crispin Glover, an appearance the actor now cheekily avoids talking about. There’s a good reason for that: The segment ends with Glover trying to kick Letterman in the head. But I’m not interested in the kick. The line I love, the one that’s stuck with me all these years after seeing it, comes a little earlier. The setup is important: Glover is in tight bell-bottoms and platform shoes, talking about being a movie star and tabloids reporting on his every move. As he speaks, he rocks back and forth on the couch. At the time, people thought he was having a breakdown or maybe just on drugs, but looking back from 2025, it’s clear this is intended to be culture-jamming performance art. The point, I suppose, is something about celebrity culture. For a few minutes, Letterman tries righting the segment, but Glover steamrolls him every time, jumping from one non sequitur to the next. As the bit drags on, you can see Letterman becoming frustrated, growing impatient with Glover’s resistance to finding something that works. Finally, Letterman looks beyond his guest to Paul Shaffer, his band leader. “Paul, is this the first time you’ve seen another guy drown?” It’s that expression, that image of drowning, that I love. It feels more accurate than saying something’s “failing,” or “bombing,” or “flopping.” It evokes so much more pain — the lungs filling up with water, the slow sinking to the bottom. It implies the whole wretched disaster could’ve been avoided. What were you thinking? Why’d you go out so deep if you didn’t know how to swim?

Go Down, Dionysus: On Michael Clune’s Pan

In 307 B.C., a young Macedonian in the mold of Alexander named Demetrius appeared with a large fleet in the sea before Athens. And this charismatic and beautiful young man made a name for himself, capturing cities and winning battles throughout Greece, becoming king of Macedon. And when he returned to Athens in 295 B.C., Demetrius, who had earned the nickname The Besieger, gathered the Athenian people in the Theatre of Dionysus to give a performance of himself as demigod. According to historian Tom Holland, “Stars embroidered on his cloak identified him with the sun. Dancers adorned with giant phalluses greeted him as though he were Dionysus. Choirs sang a hymn that proclaimed him a god and saviour.” And while Demetrius eventually died in the prison of a rival after years of disappointing harvests, I want us to think about what that moment of ecstasy must have felt like; I want you to return to that moment, Reader, in your imagination: the dancers with dildos sewn to their costumes, singing choirs, Demetrius himself with stars embroidered on his cloak. The only equivalent to this is the twentieth-century rock concert — at Zeppelin, or the Stones, or maybe Michael Jackson at the height of his fame or the Beatles at Shea Stadium. But there's something tame and sanitized about these late distant echoes of Dionysian ritual. A better, though more disturbing example, might be the assembly of the evil apparition of the Nazis at Nuremberg Stadium in 1936 — but more modern, electrified and amplified, with all the famous Nazis on amphetamines.

Not All Husbands: On Sarah Manguso’s Liars and the Iterative Politics of Marriage

In Sarah Manguso’s 2024 novel Liars, the talented and tireless Jane — a writer and professor as well as a wife and mother — suffers physical, verbal, emotional, and financial abuse at the hands of her mediocre, professionally aimless, and mean-spirited husband, John. Despite John’s utter awfulness, which runs both wide and deep, Jane stays with him for about fifteen years, until he leaves her for another woman. Liars is written in the first person with Jane as narrator, in the aftermath of her divorce from John. The book is elegant and incisive, the kind you devour in one sitting. It vibrates with Jane’s — and, by extension, Manguso’s — relentless, righteous anger. But not at John, exactly. One man, however villainous, is too narrow a focus for Manguso. This is systemic fury. After all, reflects Jane, in an attempt to justify staying with John for so long: “no married woman I knew was any better off.” And later, in surveying the ruins of her marriage: “maybe the trouble was just that men hate women.”

I Won :): A Short Story About Glory and Shame

16 HOURS OUT IT WAS COLD as frozen shit outside; the gym heater in Lock Haven PA’s only Holiday Inn was broke; so at 6AM, with 5 pounds to cut before sunrise, cocooned in a black sweatsuit, terrifying the earlybird businessmen & hotel staff; jumping rope & shadowboxing like a raging bull in the hottest corner of the 3rd Floor hallway, Pedro Cunha looked like a fucking maniac. Right before he got in the van Coach said, “You look fat.” Pedro said, “Nah, I’m on weight,” even though he had the same suspicion; he’d been too scared to weigh himself after the self-confrontation in his dorm mirror. But he prayed that in the excruciatingly frigid & boring 8 hour van ride across all of flat endless Ohio and most of troubling Pennsylvania, — where often, deep in the twists & turns, a horse & buggy would pull out in front of them to delay their journey on behalf of a ridiculous convenience-spurning God, — the requisite weight would ooze out of him like magic. Sleep wasn’t happening: he was too desperate for it. He had a sack of 22 almonds, a half-empty water bottle (yes, half-empty, he left optimism in the Oxford parking lot). He’d nibble & sip in painstaking, precise 30-minute increments; he hoped the repetition would ease time’s churn. It didn’t.

How to Write Successfully About Sex: On the Literature of Our Human Condition

In the early nineties, my sister covered sports for the New York Post. Once, at Madison Square Garden, near the end of a Knicks game that the home team led by a large margin, she saw one of the New York stars sitting on the bench, smiling and exchanging banter with teammates, while turned slightly toward the stands to keep an eye on his personal assistant, who brought beautiful women close to courtside so that the star could get a good look at them. He shook his head at the first few, then finally nodded, before turning back to the court, his post-game diversion secured. According to my sister, the personal assistant had no trouble finding women willing to submit themselves to this star’s demeaning scrutiny. Demeaning, in our opinion, perhaps not in his or theirs. Perhaps they considered the opportunity for such an appraisal an honor and a compliment; perhaps they considered it a turn-on. Who knows? Maybe an evening spent with him — most likely more than dinner and a movie — compensated for being brazenly objectified with a kingly nod or shake of the head. Who are most of us to know, or to judge?

Model Collapse: On Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead

A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the audience and they deliver to us that perceived character. Our Defense Secretary imagines what a Defense Secretary should be like and plays that version on TV. Our Attorney General plays her version of Attorney General. Trump, of course, plays Trump. They all decided to cut out the middleman — the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor — and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer. This M.O. doesn’t require much effort to conceive and execute, it’s a good tool to build your personal brand, and, as a fortuitous side effect, it has defanged the whole satire genre. How do you mock power when it acts like a bad-dream Monty Python skit?

The Art of Letting Go: On Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years

“I have been on the road for the last five months . . . really thinking the worst of people.” This is how comedian Bill Burr opens his 2010 stand-up special Let It Go, right before he launches into a tirade detailing his disgust for the human biomass he regularly encounters at the airport. It’s a sentiment you’d expect from a comedian who is known first and foremost for his anger. But contrast that with how he opens his most recent stand-up special, 2025’s Drop Dead Years: “It’s kind of a weird thing to be over fifty, really starting to realize how fucked up you are. I thought I did stand-up because I loved comedy. I did stand-up because that was the easiest way to walk into a room full of a bunch of people that I didn’t know and make everybody like me.” Not only is the message different, with Burr focused on his own faults rather than the faults of others, but so is the setting it’s delivered in. He’s not on stage when he says this. Instead, he’s leaning up against a wall outside the venue, speaking straight into the camera. The framing resembles a reality TV confessional. It’s only once he gets this insight off his chest that he’s able to go out and start telling jokes.

Forgetting Atticus Finch: Rereading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman

July will mark the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s long-lost first novel that also functions as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird — the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller that was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Gregory Peck and, well, you know. Readers have been ambivalent about Watchman. In terms of style, the novel has been deemed a far lesser achievement than its predecessor. Many have struggled with the fact that Atticus, the moral locus of Mockingbird who vigorously though unsuccessfully defends an innocent Black man against charges of rape, is revealed to harbor racist views in his old age. The release of Watchman roughly coincided with the mass shooting by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. The killing of Michael Brown had happened the year before, and Trayvon Martin and others in the years prior. Disillusionment and outrage were widespread. Few were in the mood to learn that a fictional icon was on the wrong side of history. This, coupled with controversy surrounding Harper Lee’s mental acuity at the time of the book deal, created a soft consensus that the novel should never have seen the light of day. Yet I am grateful that it has. Go Set a Watchman adds clarity and depth to the world that Lee introduced with Mockingbird; and it resonates, unsuspectingly perhaps, with our time in a way that warrants its revisiting.

The Risk of Serialized Reality: On Big Fiction and The New Seriality

When David Lynch died, the internet filled with quotes from him. I usually cringe at these sudden and predictable proliferations of soundbites that become nearly meaningless in their ubiquity. The point in moments like this is to show that you are the kind of person who posts a David Lynch quote, the quote itself is secondary at best, you might as well just post a square with the words “David Lynch Quote.” This time though, there was one quote that made its way through to me, that stuck in my brain, looping. “Ideas are like fish,” David Lynch supposedly said. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're beautiful.” I wrote the quote down. I repeated it to myself. I repeated it to my students. I kept repeating it because Lynch is talking about risk and lately I have been obsessed with the interplay of art and risk. I don’t know exactly when the seed of this obsession began, but I can point to two things I read that brought it into full bloom: Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and Shane Denson’s “The New Seriality.” I read Sinykin’s book with the same dread and thrill as a true crime narrative — aha, so this is what killed idiosyncratic literature! And then I read Denson’s article in a similar but even more impulsive way — this is what is continuing to kill idiosyncratic lit, the crime is happening right now as I read.

Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age: A Meditation on the Here and Now

In 1924, the French novelist Marcel Arland — founder of the Dadaist newspaper Aventure — wrote an article in La Nouvelle Revue Française which contained the phrase mal du siècle (the illness of the century), which he used to describe an ambivalent feeling, a dissonance, well-known to young men of his generation. Those men, many scarcely boys at the war’s beginning, had returned to a culture entirely removed from the mechanized brutality of the front from which they had emerged in 1918. It was an experience which some would try, and mostly fail, to sublimate in art and literature. As someone temperamentally conditioned to appreciate aesthetic novelty, and given to a grandiose historical view of epochs, I cannot help but feel invigorated by the prospect of a return to a new era of Romanticism, especially one described in eloquent terms by writers such as Sam Jennings: “What’s coming must be new — must be strange and fitful, awkward and passionate. A lover rediscovering the world, confused by its tactless kisses, yet charmed, endlessly by its dents and imperfections, its sadness and its religion, the dimples where its ancient smile shows.” Or indeed, in the noble and hopeful political sentiments of Ross Barkan — who sees more clearly than perhaps anyone else that the success of such a turn may portend a collective liberation of consciousness, as it did in previous times, which was followed by the emergence of unashamedly utopian modes of thinking that completely reconfigured the material conditions of the modern world: “Now we beat on into a murkier future. There is good news still, flickers of light in fog. A serf cannot liberate himself until he knows he is a serf. He must survey the land, his life, and his relation to power to see that he must get free. That is as hard as breaking the chains themselves.”

In the Course of Developing Pet Names: A Short Story About New Love and Old Dogs

They discovered who they would be to each other. Sweet and maternal — her last boyfriend had called her “bean,” or “baby” — or cool and adult. This one would not be her baby. He didn’t seem to want to be, first of all. Second of all she didn’t want him to be. The soft part of her had guided her before and she wanted the hard parts leading now. She was older now, this seemed the lesson of her younger years. Her last relationship had failed for many reasons, among them that she’d found it impossible to be someone’s baby and also to tear fuckably at their clothes. For his part, he’d tried calling the ex-wife “goose” in their early days but she wouldn't have it, found it alternately unromantic and offensive — which were how she found him, in the end, usually both at once. She walked out on him. Rejected even the couples therapy that seemed to him the least they had been promising when they spoke those vows. (Unless this belief was again mere evidence of his unromanticism.) So he tried the moniker anew with this one. Felt a bit like cheating and a bit like cleaning. Windex the toothpaste-spattered mirror. Both he and the ex-wife had been messy when they lived together. Now his place was spotless. Hers too, he’d heard from a mutual friend. Each blamed the other for their slobbiness. He knew, though, that the act of being clean was itself an act of cleansing the old. The new girl seemed to like it, goose.

Life After Ahab: On Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill

In his 1997 essay “The Wonderful White Whale of Kansas,” Paul Metcalf posed a nagging question about the respective afterlives of a pair of American classics. “If there have been so many sequels to [The Wonderful Wizard of] Oz,” he wondered, “why not Moby-Dick?” Luckily, Metcalf is here to correct the record. He proceeds to dream up a few sequels of his own, concocting different futures for the Pequod’s crew and their offspring, some of whom, in his fantasy, actually survived the wreck. In Metcalf’s imaginings, these lucky escapees decamped to the setting of Melville’s first novel, the Marquesas Islands, where they interbred with the natives “and eventually scattered into the world.” Among their heirs: Ahab’s great-grandson, a dentist in Peoria, Stubb’s great-grandson, a corporate lawyer, and a descendent of Queequeg who is the “first female mixed-race mayor of a major American city.”

The Social Pornography Complex: On Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s Got Money Troubles appears on the jacket to be a book about motherhood and pornography, but it’s really about the internet. But wait, according to internet discourse, the internet novel doesn’t exist. Actually it does exist but can never succeed. Actually it should really be called “the social media novel.” There are many opinions about what an “internet novel” is and whether or not it can be good, yet many have converged around the idea that the internet novel should carry its reader through the feeling of the internet, of being “online,” and it’s not surprising that such novels that invoke this feeling tend to conclude, at least implicitly: social media is bad. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts: Social media is fake and, by the way, it turned my boyfriend evil. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, specifically the story “The Feminist”: Social media turned me evil. Honor Levy’s My First Book: Social media has ruined my brain. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This: It’s ruined mine, too, and did you know, social media is fake? These books aren’t necessarily bad — Patricia Lockwood’s writing is a highlight, her language is a delight, and it glorifies the fun of it all — but they all carry a similar message: Log off. By now, we all understand social media can have harmful effects, yet here we are anyway. Social media is not only not going away, it will continue to have an increasing impact on our inner and outer lives. So what do we do about it?