Sniping for Love: On Derrickson and Dean’s The Gorge

The Gorge, an Apple Original, is exactly that—original—not a sequel, a remake, or based on a novel. Without fanfare or announcement, Apple TV+ (the streamer arm of the tech titan has only been around five years) released a fresh, modern love story on Valentine’s Day 2025. Directed by Scott Derrickson from a spec script written by Zach Dean, the megacorp’s slick new flick mashes multiple genres to great effect: romance, thriller, action, adventure, sci-fi and horror. Derrickson took risks on the ambitious film, and they paid off. I can’t predict whether it will stand the test of time, but despite mixed reviews, I thought The Gorge was a good movie. I will even go as far to say it was a very good movie.

The Poet of the New Gothic: On Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu

Both times I’ve seen Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu on the big screen — the first time on 35mm, the second digital; each in packed houses of squirming audiences — were vaguely ecstatic experiences. On 35mm the film was like an occult artifact, like a magic lantern capturing some older time, peeking in on things which we were perhaps not meant to be seen. I felt overwhelmed by the sound, the shadowed images — “like Rembrandts” a friend of mine said. The detail was overwhelming, the atmosphere beyond unnerving. Like being pitched into a dark storm at the center of which stood real, palpable evil. Then being vomited safely up, exhausted, on the other side. The second time I began to catch smaller things, and I started to appreciate the rhythm of the film. Something which I have yet to see remarked on in reviews of the film is just how wonderfully old-fashioned an entertainment it is. There’s humor, largely through the sheer presence of Willem Dafoe, whose Van Helsing-like character is (importantly) the only one able to give in to the wildness of the story. There are stock jump-scares: an especially horrifying one involves our first full look of the vampire (and, without exaggeration, Bill Skarsgaard’s Count Orlock is one of the most unreally-real special effects I’ve ever seen in a film). And there are moments so archetypal, which so clearly relish the obvious iconism they’re drawing on, that often the audience is left with nothing to do but laugh (somewhat uncomfortably) at how fully the film has committed to it.

When You Ain’t Got Nothing: On Bob Dylan and A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the sky: becoming fodder for a few Golden Globes. It would be heartrending if it weren’t so absurd. The insanity of it all was not lost on a group of young cinephiles attending the Angelika in late October who, during the previews, caught their first big-screen glimpse of Timothée Chalamet’s mannered impersonation, and began laughing.

Would You Rather Have Married Young?: On Lena Dunham, Sally Rooney, and The End of Experience

In an iconic episode of Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spontaneously spends a weekend with a hot, respectful doctor in his expensive brownstone. After a couple of sublime days in his house she suffers a moment of shameful envy. “Please don’t tell anyone this,” she says, in tears, “but I want to be happy.” Doctor: Of course you do. Everyone does. Hannah: But I didn’t think that I did. I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences, all of them, so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them, but it gets so tiring, trying to take in all the experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here and I see you. And you’ve got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff, the robe, you’re touching me the way that… I realize I’m not different, you know? I want what everyone wants, I want what they all want, I want all the things. I just want to be happy.

Interstellar Ineptitude: On Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public. Any consumer of contemporary literature is familiar with the end result of this compromise: small “l” literary with enough genre convention to find its way into book clubs, morally ambiguous but not so much as to obscure its political message (lest The Guardian have to think of adjectives beyond “urgent” and “important” in their praise), with prose elevated beyond the typical Taylor Jenkins Reid fare but never so much as to alienate the typical Taylor Jenkins reader. They are magical realist murder mysteries, multigenerational historical epics, Westerns and dystopians that are just anticlimactic enough to escape the “genre” label.

Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men: On Gender in Contemporary Fiction

I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women. Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed. So, here’s what this is not: I’m not saying that literary culture has degraded because women pack the book world to the brim; I’m not saying that Stephen King and James Patterson are immaterial nobodies, that their sales numbers matter not at all; I’m not saying that nonwhite folk have a cinch of a time getting their books on the shelves; and I’m not saying that female editors should now be freighted with the grim responsibility of victors and must dole out ginormous contracts to yearning and pitiful mediocrities just because they happen to be male. Everyone knows that some of the writers crying foul about the paucity of men getting published are mere aggrieved nimrods trapped in a deserved eternity of irrelevance. The phallus is no skeleton key for unlocking the mystery of their nothingness. They just suck.

Desperado Dadaism: On a New Biography of Terry Allen

Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Lights” sightings helped to kick off the UFO craze. In 1988, 12,000 pilgrims came to Lubbock to witness an alleged apparition of Mary. In between these two phenomena, a young man named Terry Allen left Lubbock for California. He wanted to become an artist, but he wound up becoming something more. Allen is perhaps the only person in history to achieve equal acclaim in the fields of conceptual art and country music. His work hangs in major museums and his public installations can be seen livening up the staid financial districts of major cities, while his weird, warped, and warm brand of outlaw country, to his devoted cult, stands shoulder to shoulder with Willie, Townes, and the rest. Brendan Greaves, who through his offbeat, literate “American vernacular” record label Paradise of Bachelors helped to rescue Allen’s music from defunct-label oblivion, spent five years talking to Allen, his friends, and his collaborators to produce Truckload of Art, the first major biography of him and his work. For anyone with an interest in any of the things I mentioned above, it’s essential reading: as a record of a truly underappreciated American artist, a narrative of a biographer coming to know his subject, and an exploration of the perils and joys of a creative life.

Cooties and Careers: On Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt

Ty Rossberg ought to try being a serial killer. He’d at least be more loved than what he is in Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt: a straight white male writer during the dawn of the Trump era. While his girlfriend Jenny Marks’ new essay collection is the hottest book of the year, he is relegated to playing the once prestigious, now subordinate, role as sole breadwinner (as a management consultant). Her semi-truthful account of her abortion captivates audiences, elevating her to the “literary equivalent of the Rolling Stones, or at least the National,” as Ty snidely remarks to himself while attending her reading in Chicago.

The Hotel Egypt is an exploration of a modern American man’s yearning to be needed and relevant. The results are mixed, with a relatively strong first part that wanders into the surreal and which ultimately undermines the story’s initial intriguing bitterness. In many ways, Ty has a great life: he has an apparent soulmate for a girlfriend (both he and Jenny grew up together in Queens, went to the same schools, and have similar literary ambitions), he has a well-paying career, and he lives comfortably in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood. Yet something crucial is missing in his life.

Summer’s Gone: On Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

It’s not a book for summer. Despite the yellow checkered cover, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which came out in September, is most certainly a winter book. The yellow is wrong anyway, not the yellow of sun, but instead tinged with a sickness, the checkered pattern alternating between subdued yellow and gray. Like a jaundiced hue, the cover blends in with the orange and marigold seats on the subway, configuration and color of a D train about to be defunct. Shortly after Intermezzo came out, my ex bought me a copy at Target. It was from the Brooklyn Target in Caesar’s Bay with a view of Coney Island on one side and the Verrazzano on the other. It was still warm, the waves outside the box stores lapping like summer. And I thought, how wonderful it must be to have every type of literary success. Rooney is equally displayed at indie bookstores, on the cool hotgirl IG pages, and also under the bright, antiseptically illuminated aisles of big box stores. But it took several attempts to truly commit to this book.

Escaping the Panopticon: On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

What do you need to build a panopticon? If you ask the ghost of Jeremy Bentham, who originated the concept in the late 18th century, he’d say something like the following: you need a circular building with a central observation tower staffed by a single guard. You need the ring of the building to be built with cells filled with prisoners who are being observed by the guard in the tower. If you ask the contemporary liberal subject — the citizen of a free society — you’d receive a more complicated answer. The modern concept of a panopticon isn’t confined to a single building, but expands into the more sprawling, networked, and technologically sophisticated notion of the authoritarian surveillance state.

A Tepid Search for Genius: On Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.”

The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.

The Blind Spot: On Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Boxing is the most honest of sports. The boxer, unlike the normal person, steps into the ring and willingly accepts that he’ll be punched in the face. Anyone can throw a punch at a heavy bag, but you’re not a boxer until you’ve eaten some punches and nodded like a demented little freak at the guy trying to take you out. Years ago, in the heat of my boxing fandom, I had my dad buy me a pair of gloves and I proceeded to throw jabs and hooks and uppercuts into the air. The great Mexican fighter, Julio César Chávez, was one of my heroes, and, so, for a brief interlude in the burgeoning days of my adolescent baseball career, I thought that I’d give boxing a go. I was already a jock, after all, so the transition would be easy. I was a tough kid, too. I’d watched hundreds of bouts alongside my dad, so, like a typical young man, I thought: I can do that. I can throw a punch. I can bob and weave and bounce off the ropes and attack my opponents with body shots and keep coming. I can surely take a punch.

A Flawed Novel Addresses A Failed Utopia: On Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals

We can never escape the world. Nor can we remake it. This truism underscores all great would-be utopian novels, from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon — an anagram of “nowhere” — to dystopias proper like Brave New World and 1984, to failed-cult novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Any attempt to lift a few, quixotic human beings out of the psychosocial morass of human nature

Dream Warrior: On Bruce Wagner’s Remarkable Oeuvre

The time has come for Bruce Wagner. Because Wagner is the most pun-drunk writer since Nabokov, if not since Shakespeare, I couldn’t possibly not mean this phrase in multiple senses. For one thing, Wagner says he’s finished. After an almost 35-year career in fiction punctuated by occasional movie and TV writing, which includes his celebrated screenplay

Great American Misfire: On Percival Everett’s James

Percival Everett’s James is a novel that's set on the eve of the Civil War, in a town in Missouri. It's told from the point of view of James, who is Black and who is an enslaved man. He and his wife and daughter are owned by a woman named Miss Watson, and he often has to do tasks for her like chopping wood and hauling chickenfeed. James has a wife and a daughter. They live in a cottage. It's not clear what this wife and daughter do with their time, but this family survives and they seem to love each other.