Life of Intrigue: On Fathers, Paperbacks, and Unsolvable Mysteries

The news came by text from my older sister. Just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. No other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: Thanks for letting me know. Call you later. I tried calling my sister that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again. My father’s death didn’t come as a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.

A Pastor and His Satellite / The Church: Two Short Stories

This was some time ago on a Saturday in New England, in the home of a family of domestic missionaries from the South. “Quiet,” said Saul, “Father is in there with his sermon.” “If he’s finished, we can knock,” said Faith, his younger sister. “No, he’s finishing his sermon. Let’s make him breakfast.” “Let’s serve pancakes.” “Do you think he can eat while he works?” “Have you ever seen him work?” “No,” said Saul, “but he is so often in there working. It is why we do not see him.”

The Corporeal Internet Novel: On Cairo Smith’s Scenebux

Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.” The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.

This Land Belongs to All of Us: On Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.”

“All Night Waitress”

Just her and me: she sits with her legs / twined ankle to knee, her hand / hiding the bruises / on her cheek. She dangles car keys as if thinking / about escape to some otherwhere without these islands / of formica tabletops afloat in the neon Sargasso Sea / of two a.m. where I eat as quietly as I can, / not wanting to disturb her privacy / after she set down gently my cherry pie / and retreated back to the farthest table. / The jut of her jaw multiplied in every pane / sets night’s teeth on edge / in the doppler whine / of truck tires fading far away.

The Barbarism of Yesteryear: On Max Watman’s Tomorrow, the War

One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating to our contemporary selves what life felt like in the distant past. The philosophical notion of phenomenology was an attempt to understand previous eras on their own terms, instead of imposing our present mores onto them. This would suggest that the best way to get a sense of the past would be to read first-hand accounts from various periods, which might provide a sense of their prevailing zeitgeists.

Cerfin’ U.S.A.: On Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

Emoji-faced Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and star of the YouTube-friendly game show What’s My Line?, is no longer remembered. In his lifetime, he was close to Frank Sinatra (a pallbearer at Cerf’s funeral), Truman Capote (declined to be a pallbearer — too waifish?), William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Seuss, etc. etc. etc. Each one easily worth a monumental biography; yet in Nothing Random Gayle Feldman gives Cerf and his publishing kingdom (only after his death an empire) the 1,000-page treatment.

I Fear LA: On Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick

Susie Vogelman is young, beautiful, loaded, and completely and hopelessly addicted to OxyContin. After her roommate overdoses on prescription drugs and dies, Susie drops out of NYU. We meet her as she’s living in the sprawling Los Angeles mansion that belongs to her father — corporate counsel to the Sickler family, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Sacklers, of Purdue Pharma fame.

Colossus: A Novel Excerpt

I slow down in front of the Snowbin residence. It’s Lon, alone, no wife, no family. He was here when I bought Utopia Gardens and I was warned he was fickle. In particular, the old owners, a consortium of bored energy dealers out of Maumee who wanted to dabble in Michigan real estate, had created a quasi-intuitive internal system of red and yellow cards to denote tenants who proved, over time, problematic. Snowbin flitted between red (most severe) and yellow (rather severe) with no discernible rhyme or reason.

Will Cinema Get Brave Again? On Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama

They’ve been calling Kristoffer Borgli this year’s enfant terrible, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. I’ve been avoiding all The Drama drama. I’ve fully opted out. Deep within my brittle bones I’ve grown more than fatigued by the cinematic discourse du jour. I’ve started to feel its weight, like a particularly evil germ, haunting my digestive tract.

Can We Have a Party? On Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up windows made things feel fake-apocalyptic. Then we heard the sound of glass smashing and people screaming. My friend wanted to leave, but I insisted we turn the corner to see what was happening. We stuck our heads past the faux-brick wall and saw no one. The screaming and window-smashing cut to dialogue. It was coming from a television in someone’s apartment. The protest, when we found it, was also an overproduced phantasm.

“Overkill” and “My Dreams Did Not Come True”

Jet-black lager like domino on swan / Toddler thoughts on the moon’s face / I wrote a novel during the year I knew you / Your casino watch and birthmark / We curved evenings out of rigid anger / You reminded me of a dead world / which is to say my childhood / I knew our time was baby time but I gave / it away anyway, spewing dollars / from buildings. As if no one could touch me / if I closed my eyes

The Ungraspable Oz: On the Great American Film

Christmastime in Las Vegas: tinsel on the slot machines, Santa hats on the pit bosses, short days, vivid winter sunsets, balmy nights. Tourist shortages have recently put the city in a nervous mood, as Americans increasingly choose to gamble from the safety of their couches, but you wouldn’t know that making your way through the crowds that fill the plush lobbies and malls and casino floors of the Wynn and the Venetian and the Flamingo, crowds of staggering variety: couples and families from Tel Aviv, from Dubai, from Shenzhen, all there to experience the most American of cities, that strange neon bloom in the desert built on mob money and defense money and the fantasy of hitting it big.

Spirit of America: On Don DeLillo and Ghost Language

The 20th century variously imagined the end of history: rapture, communism, the triumph of neoliberalism. For the people of the Lamb of God, it was a gust of wind and words. Partly because far-away Jews had recently reclaimed the city of Jerusalem and partly because of our own faithfulness, we believed we were witnessing the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Heaven was “inbreaking,” and before long, it would fully sweep the earth.

They Got the Beat: On the 6 Gallery Reading

On October 7, 1955, five poets stood on a tiny stage at the back of a small art gallery in an unfashionable part of San Francisco and read their most challenging work. The result was an astounding success that no one expected. It was the right collection of poets reading in the right venue at the right time to the right audience. Against all odds, their work resonated with the approximately 150 people in the crowd and sparked a literary revolution. That night is widely considered the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance as well as the moment when the Beat Generation dramatically expanded and began to go public.