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.

The Death of the Author: A Short Story of Rebellion

Like so many present-day projects, the novel writing of Clayton Daniels began as a joke and grew into a serious commercial and cultural enterprise. His stories weighed so heavily as artifacts that they were on the verge of dismissal as frivolities. While studying for the bar, still wet and green and knobby-kneed, he wrote a first-person account of digital addiction called The Glass Gutter, in which he sarcastically catalogued the pain of a young man spending all his time swiping and scrolling, watching videos of robberies gone awry, murderous road rage episodes, men slipping on bicycles and skateboards and, to use outdated slang, racking their nards.

Kill the Editor: On the End of Literary Prestige

Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, they also disclosed that they rarely accept any manuscripts in the unsolicited category, affectionately referred to as the slush pile. For the most part, the slush pile is read by interns who pass along their favorites to be ignored by the editors.