The Lost Art of Evil: On Fernanda Melchor’s Circuits of Transgression

Adjacent to recent conversations and debates about the relationship between art, politics, and the canon, another rumbles just below the surface, informing and making possible the very question of a work of art’s politics or ideology. I’m going to get to a specific case in a bit, but before I do, here are a few assumptions that complicate everything I will suggest: 1. Trotting out and dusting off the good old intentional fallacy here, the potential difference between an author’s worldview, or ideology, and their work makes it difficult to parse out the politics of a text, let alone the internal contradictions that make attempts at buttonholing it so fraught.

The Wandering Fascist: On the New Translation of Maurizio Serra’s Malaparte: A Biography

There’s a passage in Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris which, for all of its contradictions, helps explain the lingering fascination with Malaparte’s work. While there’s something inherently fraught in giving Malaparte the first word, it’s also useful to establish him as an edifice of sorts. Whether that edifice will be torn down or defaced in the words to come remains to be seen. The year is 1948. Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert, is living in Paris.

A Million Little Failures: On James Frey’s Next to Heaven

I went to the launch party for James Frey’s Next to Heaven mostly to see Carole Radziwill. In the eight years that I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never seen any of our “Real Housewives” in person, despite being alert to the possibility — despite remaining hopeful that it will happen — whenever I’m on the Upper East Side for a doctor appointment, or at Balthazar for someone’s birthday dinner, or find myself walking by Zarin Fabrics. I’m sure if I spent more time in these kinds of well-heeled spaces, it would inevitably happen.

Better to Be a Ghost: On Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros

Giorgio de Chirico has languidly stumbled upon the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence and wonders if it might make for a nice streetscape. But in the process of turning recollection into painted object, he finds himself transmuting the piazza’s distinguishing forms. A wide-open square, when painted, becomes a compressed court; a Gothic temple becomes Hellenic; an imposing white marble effigy of Dante Alighieri, circa 1865, becomes a relic from antiquity. Here, apparently, was the birth of pittura metafisica: the object rendered and transcended, turned into a signifier of a world beyond plain sight.

Your Own Intellectual Jesus: On Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates

“When we are no longer willing to die for the truth, there will be no truth anymore,” conservative German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observed gloomily during a conversation with Slovenian philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Žižek in 2023, suggesting we might be living through the end of an era inaugurated by Socrates, “the first martyr for the European concept of truth.” Agnes Callard’s new book Open Socrates, which claims to make the case for a philosophical life, could not be more timely.

The Banality of Evil: On Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions

All I knew about Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions when I agreed to review it was its title. The discovery that it is a work of “historiographic metafiction” about life in the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland prompted a small groan. In recent years, I’ve found solace in conventional novels about social and domestic life by authors like Anne Tyler and Jo Baker. Fiction that treats the uneventful lives of ordinary people, especially women, as worthy subjects has brought comfort in unsettled and unsettling times. I feared The Requisitions would be too abstruse — more concerned with the technical aspects of warfare and death camps than with human experiences.

Bohemian Rhapsody: On David Polonoff’s WannaBeat

There’s a Van Gogh quote that’s always stuck with me: “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.” Written in a letter to his brother Theo, what Van Gogh means by “it” is clear — his artistic practice. But what his search entails is more open to interpretation — as well as application. Lonesome Vincent had his needs, and other artists theirs. Where, then, and how should artists search? Within? Without? Both? Van Gogh would assuredly say both: that in making art one should look everywhere for beauty, meaning, and purpose.

The Silent Scream of Lonely Young Men: On ARX-Han’s Incel

We’ve come a long way since Jay McInerney’s bestselling Bright Lights, Big City hit the shelves — 40 years chronologically, although solving for the digital revolution’s impact on the human psyche, it might as well have been centuries ago. Even so, with regard to character arcs, ARX-Han, in his self-published and increasingly popular novel Incel, picks up right where McInerney’s famously second-person, nameless narrator left off. Just as McInerney, with his deadpan wit, eased us from skepticism into cynicism, ARX-Han’s Incel antihero, anon, continues the downward trajectory with mordant self-parody, sliding past nihilism into despair. Nothing new under the Black Hole Sun, so to speak.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

A Flight From Slow, Sad Reality: On Scott Spires’ Social Distancing

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 with their artisanal beard wax and fair trade coffee had long worn out their punchline. My job at the time was ingratiating myself to hospitality workers, concierges of major hotels especially, so they might hand out my company’s travel magazine to any tourist looking for the hottest restaurant in the hippest neighborhood, one willing to advertise to the type of tourist who still reads print mags in the first place.

The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature

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 little autofictions about that time someone was mean to us in our MFA program, Michel Houellebecq was concocting terrorist attacks and farmers’ rebellions with such sociological acuity that one or two of them actually came true.