Can Short Stories Still Shock? Modes once heralded as avant-garde now linger among the array of strategies available to any writer.
year in culture 2015
Dec. 8, 2015
The 10 Best Books of 2015 Where will Ta-Nehisi Coates take us next?
My Chat With Knausgaard (Not Just About Hitler) The Norwegian novelist on European refugees, Hitler, and his own Argentinian dream.
17 Reviews of Opening Lines of New Books How fair is it to judge a book by its opening? We’re doing it anyway.
What to Make of Michel Houellebecq’s Caliphate Fantasia Submission Already the novel has been said to represent about a thousand different things.
sylvia plath
Oct. 28, 2015
Do We Have a New Sylvia Plath Sex Scandal? The London literary world is genuinely atwitter.
Obama As Book Critic: the President on Marilynne Robinson As an interviewer, Obama has a touch of “The Chris Farley Show” about him.
Why Are Today’s Critics So Defensive? We’re in an age of ambient anxiety about what it means to enjoy things and whether or not others enjoy them, too.
‘I Won the Nobel Prize!’ An interview with the translator of the new Nobel laureate.
City on Fire Is Trying to Have It Too Many WaysThe year’s biggest debut says a lot about what sort of story New York publishers and Hollywood think they can sell.
Gamelife : Michael Clune’s New Gamer-Memoir ClassicAll those hours spent at the keyboard of a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe, was any of it really fun?
Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving Joan Didion, whether you’re a 20-something woman who’d wear Céline if she could afford it or a Gen X man in corduroys.
Gary Indiana’s Great Material “People like us are lucky because every shitty thing that happens to us is just more material,” Indiana has recalled Burroughs telling him.
fall preview 2015
Aug. 26, 2015
fall preview 2015
Aug. 26, 2015
My Favorite Doctorow: When He Played It Straight It turned out that Doctorow the experimental historical novelist was also very good — masterful, really — at playing it straight.
The Best Books of 2015 (So Far) Not included: the fastest-selling novel of the year.
Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman : Better Off Lost? What can you make of a vastly inferior novel with a much more sophisticated morality?
Benjamin Markovits’s Obama Novel Obama himself even makes an appearance, delivering a speech with the line that gives the novel its title and giving the narrator a bloody nose with a misplaced elbow in a pickup basketball game.
The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace How the author of Infinite Jest became the center of a self-help cult.
vulture lists
June 29, 2015
Should White Men Stop Writing? A Q&A With Elisa Gabbert “White liberals should be questioning our own motives, and being careful not to dominate the conversation, and taking criticism seriously.”
international intrigue
May 6, 2015
All Bets Are Off in Britain’s Messy Election With Conservatives and Labour neck-and-neck, David Cameron and Ed Miliband have entered desperation mode.
Is Radical Queerness Possible Anymore? Poet Maggie Nelson’s New Memoir The couple watch X-Men: First Class in bed and debate whether it’s better to be an assimilationist or a revolutionary. Are they fated to homonormativity?
The Very Public Saga of Karl Ove Knausgaard Writing About Himself His latest Volume 4: Dancing in the Dark is a lesser work than the first two books (though better than the third).
