Strange Lights
The originality here lies in the author's ability to reshuffle the materials of pop literature and contemplate them anew.
All Reviews
Advertising Degree Zero: William Gibson's "Zero History"
This future is a scarier place, by far, than any that SF has yet imagined.
Boiling Point
The literary world tends to think of genre fiction in very short-hand terms, defined by rigid conventions, styles, plots, and readerships.
Tall Redhead Syndrome
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.
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.
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.
The Sign
It is almost entirely abstract.
The Bridge
Beauty linked to life and death.
It's Good to be King
King's technical expertise as a writer is almost impossible to ignore, regardless of how one feels about stories involving man-eating oil slicks.
Marilynalia
Despite how much she has been dissected, analyzed, and worshipped, something about Marilyn Monroe remains forever elusive.