Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert
Herbert’s new collection is an ambitious, generous boon . . . his parody of Tarantino’s style and MacSweeney’s lively translation chart unmarked territory.
Blog
The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark
Best known for being a novelist, Muriel Spark was also a writer of short stories, many of which were ghostly. In her ghost stories, more often than not, Spark tests the old tropes by giving them a firm twist.
Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano
What makes Modiano’s new novel such an enchanting read is its insistence on the importance of “those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting,” and its glyptic insights into the mechanisms by which forgetting offers up alternative chronologies . . .
What Do Our Monsters Say About Us?
A new collection of essays, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, offers readers a digestible and critical examination of the monstrous as a way to force us to consider the politics behind what we deem monstrous, and how a deeper understanding of what haunts us may lead to a new, previously unimagined, future.
“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell
Russell’s most recent book, chronicling a walk from the panhandle of Florida to the celestial city of Miami, comes to the conclusion that a walking journey should not only be a journey about the self, but also about how the self exists in a built environment.
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
In poems that tenderly call us to action, Mattawa awakens readers to the human and geographical devastation wrought by the tendency to “other” people. Fugitive Atlas is a collaborative prayer for a shattered earth.
The Banality of Evil in The Turn of the Screw
Henry James’s 1898 novella exists as a sort of literary question not unlike that posed by Hannah Arendt. Are the ghosts in this ghost story actually present, or are they just extensions of its governess’s disordered mind? Or—to put it another way—if evil is present in the narrative, where is it coming from?
Max Blecher’s Landscapes of Illness
Illness is not Blecher’s subject as much as it is the occasion that forces his protagonists into a world of previously unavailable experience—a world that makes it impossible for those who fall ill to ever be “cured” of the way of being, seeing, and thinking into which they have now been initiated.
“My intention in everything I ever write is to leave no traces of quotidian design”: An Interview with Carlos Lara
Lara’s latest collection of poetry is avowedly anti-thematic, anti-linear, post-itself. It is, in the speaker’s own words, simply “some moments imbued with the crass economy of self.”