Houman Barekat is a writer and critic based in London, and founding editor of Review 31. He reviews for The Guardian, Financial Times, The Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The New Statesman, Literary Review, and The London Magazine. He is co-editor (with Robert Barry and David Winters) of The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online (O/R Books, 2017).
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Digital Immortality
Is online memory preservation a form of healthy grieving or digital necrophilia?...
Vernacular Pornography
Is sexual folk art a democratic repository of human creativity?...
“No Demons Amongst Us”: On Simon Lancaster’s “You Are Not Human: How Words Kill”
Houman Barekat looks closely at “You Are Not Human: How Words Kill” by Simon Lancaster....
Get Lots of Happenings: On Mike Wendling’s “Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House”
Houman Barekat considers “Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House,” an analysis of far-right internet culture by Mike Wendling....
A Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits: On Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life”
Houman Barekat questions “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” by Jordan B. Peterson....
“Tiny Paragraphs Pulsed in His Veins”: On Johannes Urzidil’s “The Last Bell”
Houman Barekat is struck by “The Last Bell,” a collection of stories by German Bohemian writer Johannes Urzidil....
“The Emotion-Recollected-in-Tranquility Racket”: On J. D. Daniels’s “The Correspondence: Essays”
Houman Barekat journeys through “The Correspondence: Essays” by J. D. Daniels....
The Whole Point About War: On Lara Pawson’s “This Is the Place to Be”
Houman Barekat on journalist Lara Pawson's memoir, "This Is the Place to Be."...
Breaking Godwin’s Law: Stoddard Martin’s “Monstrous Century”
Houman Barekat appreciates the old-school rigor of “Monstrous Century: Essays in The Age of the Feuilleton” by Stoddard Martin....
Vulgar and Unsightly: Adrian Nathan West’s J’accuse Against Extremely Degrading Pornography
Houman Barekat delves into “The Aesthetics of Degradation” by Adrian Nathan West....
The Internet-y Novel
A cautionary tale of love and internet celebrity....
The Thief, The Friend, His Wife, and Her Lover
Adulterous prurience served cold....
Joseph Roth, “The Hotel Years”
Joseph Roth’s work is so intimately preoccupied with modernity that no account of the cultural history of the era would be complete without it....
Nabokov’s Geographies
Houman Barekat on Robert Roper's "Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita."...
Their Silver Lining: Nazi Genocide and Eastern Europe
FROM THE BALTIC to the Black Sea, Slavic anti-Semitism was already well entrenched by the time the Nazis took it upon ...
Circulation Jerks: On the Book as Fetish Object
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN a more apt time to write a book about books. If the rise of digital media hasn&...
Everything Is Fluid
TWENTY-SEVEN PAGES INTO The Eye (1965), Vladimir’s Nabokov’s narrator, hitherto a picture of sardonic indifference, suddenly goes all political ...
The Read-Write Generation
A 2008 REPORT BY the Washington-based Council on Library and Information Resources predicted that "the library of the 21st century will ...
