Boiling Point
The literary world tends to think of genre fiction in very short-hand terms, defined by rigid conventions, styles, plots, and readerships.
Archive
Tall Redhead Syndrome
A Reader's Guide to Peter Mountford: An Interview
Finance and economics clearly play an important role in contemporary history, but for some reason there’s very little “literary” fiction about them.
Posthumous
Keys to the City
It is neither an accident nor a disaster that humanity is now, for the first time in its history, a predominantly urban species.
Letter From Trinidad: Beyoncé Is Gold
Like all pop stars of the stature she’s now attained, Beyoncé is less an expresser of herself than a mirror for our fantasies and fears.
Narcocorridos: Ed Vulliamy's "Amexica"
"Few ever stop to ask how many lives just went up a supermodel's nose." Or got smoked in a bowl. Or rolled in a joint.
The Middle Years: Michael Cunningham's "By Nightfall"
Ah, Middle Age. Ye despised state.
Social Darwinism
The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends.
Some Kind of Animal
It’s a moral dilemma described in devastating images of both his mother’s failures and the author’s own bottomless faults.
Don't Fence Her In
Since Wyoming is now popularly associated with Dick Cheney and Matthew Shepard's murderers, it’s good to see a more complex portrait of the territory.
Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai’s World Fair
The idea that Orwell rather than Huxley was the one to turn to if one wanted a fictional lens through which to see China went virtually unchallenged..
Where the Action Was
This was the canonical American art for which the claim "you had to be there" seemed strongest ...
Stephen Potter: Life Among the Acquaintances
The Potter voice: that mock-pedantic tone of winning modesty and warm condescension.
Channeling Georg Trakl: Christian Hawkey's "Ventrakl"
A "ghostly reanimation" of the poet's textual presence; translation gives way to transposition, to citational graft and recycling.
Skin Deep
Word and line can marry enticingly in the art of tattoo.