Against Doom: On Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”

This Is Top Forty: On Chris Dalla Riva’s Uncharted Territory

There’s a channel on Stingray Music, an online streaming service based in Canada, called All-Time Greatest Hits. A typical five-song set goes like this: Billie Eilish followed by Foreigner followed by Gladys Knight & the Pips followed by Rihanna and ending with the Lovin’ Spoonful. Contrary to the passivity that streaming often cultivates, All-Time Greatest Hits demands the opposite. The mood and the genre and the era change constantly. Nothing is put on a pedestal. Everything played is treated equally.

The Past Is a Foreign City: On Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz

You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers.

Selfish and Exhausted: On Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You

To be fair, it’s not like Patricia Lockwood doesn’t warn us. “I was having a Protagonist Problem,” she declares. “I could not move, or make anything happen.” Of course, by the time the reader of her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reaches this acknowledgement midway through the book, they’re likely already aware of both the “protagonist problem” at the heart of the novel and the failure of Lockwood’s trademark self-referential humor to solve it. Credit to Lockwood for her self-awareness, but the authorial disclaimer is too little, too late.

The Transgressive Muse: On Timothy Atkinson’s Help Me I’m in Hell

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, “—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But the poet was missing an element. The last two centuries have seen the binary coupling evolve into a ménage à trois. A hot newcomer, Transgression, has joined the hallowed pair as the transcendent purpose and valorizing principle of art, bringing with it a perverse polycule of aesthetic virtues — shock value, envelope-pushing, norm-busting, taboo-shattering, bourgeois-épatering — without which the modern literary canon, and certainly its cover copy and promotional spin, would be seriously bereft.

The Miraculous and Miserable City: Jon Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer at 100

At the turn of the 20th century, the city became a source of concern, something to study, something to ponder. On the back of the Industrial Revolution and the concurrent disappearance of older, more rural forms of life, millions of people in what is called “The West” began to move to urban centers. With Empire and imperialism at their height — recall that the Berlin Conference, where the imperial powers divided up Africa, happened only in 1884 — the city expanded and became the metropolis.

How to Be a Man: On the Booker-Winning David Szalay

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

Freedom in a Box: On Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love

I spent the entire day at the Met and it wasn’t enough. Unsurprisingly, because of the sheer volume of pieces, and beyond that — endlessly more frustrating — because no later than lunch smoke was coming out of my ears. I was exhausted. I had tried to prioritize, to start easy on the second floor, strolling through the European paintings and focusing on the wings I wouldn’t have access to back home. But I got stuck in the drawings before the Europeans even started. I was in front of Matisse’s Jazz series and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Something stopped me dead in my tracks.

The British Spiritual Twilight: On Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings

In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the coming-of-age story of Hollinghurst’s gay, half-Burmese protagonist. Raised by his white, working-class single mother in an austere market town, Win lives out the arc of a queer British Bildungsroman.

A Novel in the Bardo: On Amie Barrodale’s Trip

I discovered the writing of Amie Barrodale in my college English class while reading an old Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, whose short story collection, Homesick for Another World, I’d just read. As my professor lectured to braindead twentysomethings about a medieval Persian poet, I scrolled to the bottom of the page where the interviewer asks Moshfegh if there’s a writer she looks up to, and Moshfegh responds with a recommendation of her friend Amie Barrodale’s story collection, You Are Having a Good Time.

Why Woolf?: On Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions.

A New Yorker’s New York: On Gay Talese’s A Town Without Time

It’s hard to wrestle with Gay Talese. At 93, he is old but spry, and his sentences are so quietly, consistently effective that you may not realize he has you pinned. Reading a new collection of his New York-themed reportage, A Town Without Time, I wondered if we had been taking Talese for granted, the way we took Gene Hackman for granted, or that one red sauce restaurant with the very good amatriciana that is supposed to never close — until, suddenly, it does. In its wake comes a new Chipotle.

The American Dream-Master: On Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon returns, let us hope not for the last time, to an America finally besieged by its own Gestapo, Ice also being the surname of the tech-lord villain of his last novel, 2013’s Bleeding Edge. Twelve years on, on my own side of the pond, we endure the resistible rise of our own British-grown wannabe fascists, led by an anti-European whose fake French surname is one vowel shift away from “Nigel Farrago,” a Pynchon-ass moniker if ever there was one. Yes, we know where we are. So forth, as the man himself likes to say.

To Hell With the End of the World: On László Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769

In a 2018 interview with the Paris Review, László Krasznahorkai, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed to have finished writing novels. A peculiar thing, then, coming out of retirement on a long flat note, with a Kenny G-esque stunt performance of windy and pointless proportion. Herscht 07769, written after the end of his novel-writing career, is remarkable in this regard at least: It manages to snuff out the dark, rich atmosphere of his earliest works in garrulous vapor, thus fulfilling with an ironic vacuity their ominous presaging of annihilation.

I Coulda Guessed Half of That: On Harvey Pekar and American Splendor

When I was a young boy, I’d sit in the backseat of my parents’ car as we passed the Limerick city Garda station. In front of this station is an old statue of a robed man clutching his head, which seems to be at once melting and splitting into three other heads. One time as we passed this statue I asked my parents who it was that was being depicted, and my mother answered, That’s what’ll happen to you if you think about that statue too long. After that moment, I was terrified of stumbling on a thought that featured the man in the statue, lest my head melt as well.