Re-centering the individual experience on a site premised on selling to the collective.

Re-centering the individual experience on a site premised on selling to the collective.

Selling the Collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews”

Tara Cheesman

Latest

Latest
Selling the Collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews”
Tara Cheesman
Selling the Collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews”
Tara Cheesman

He manages to embed an impressive amount of personal information in unexpected places, leaving the reader to wonder what is real and what is imaginary. Moreover, and often in the same piece, the writing can move from very funny to strangely poignant.

Tara Cheesman
Manual for the First Field
Ish Klein
Manual for the First Field
Ish Klein

"Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now / somewhat over the choppy waves.

Ish Klein
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams

I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.

Evan Williams
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill

While she positions herself as an inside critic fed up with the excesses of the left, and as someone who embraces Marxist ideas herself, her recent work demonstrates serious confusion about the nature of exploitation, one of the most basic Marxist concepts.

Tim Gill
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

Philip Harris
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru
Drew Dickerson
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru
Drew Dickerson

The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.

Drew Dickerson
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller

As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Lucy Schiller
Hurricaneland
Joshua Vigil
Hurricaneland
Joshua Vigil

Last time I saw her, it was also during hurricane season, I said—there to inspect the land before it got washed away, I thought. She wanted to see what our constructed world was like before it was leveled again.

Joshua Vigil
Subscriber Content
Victims of Fate: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Operatic Treatment of History and its Actors 
Madeleine Crum
Essay, Vol 2.2
Victims of Fate: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Operatic Treatment of History and its Actors 
Madeleine Crum
Essay, Vol 2.2

Erpenbeck treats her characters’ helplessness as deeply felt and tragic, an attitude she might’ve developed as a young person leading up to reunification or during her years directing operas.

Madeleine Crum
Essay, Vol 2.2
Self-Portrait in Hell
Julius Taranto
FictionPoetry, Vol 2.2
Self-Portrait in Hell
Julius Taranto
FictionPoetry, Vol 2.2

We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.

Julius Taranto
FictionPoetry, Vol 2.2
Form, Form, Form: On Mike Corrao’s “Surface Studies”
Kelly Krumrie
Vol 2.2, Review
Form, Form, Form: On Mike Corrao’s “Surface Studies”
Kelly Krumrie
Vol 2.2, Review

Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.

Kelly Krumrie
Vol 2.2, Review
A Shattered Geometry: On Palestinian Painters
Jake Romm
Essay, Vol 2.2
A Shattered Geometry: On Palestinian Painters
Jake Romm
Essay, Vol 2.2

Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.

Jake Romm
Essay, Vol 2.2
The Beatles were More Jewish than you Think
Danny Caine
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry
The Beatles were More Jewish than you Think
Danny Caine
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry

After the line “but when you talk about destruction,” he could not decide whether he wanted to sing 

“don’t you know that you can count me out,”

or

“don’t you know that you can count me in.”

Danny Caine
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry
from “Forty Weeks”
Lindsay Turner
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry
from “Forty Weeks”
Lindsay Turner
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry

Chipmunk on the path almost as fast as I can see it. Underneath the crisping reddish edges—all the fear in the world but I didn’t say it like that. 

Lindsay Turner
Vol 2.2, FictionPoetry
Latest
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill
Exploitation, Marx, and the American Working Class: A Misunderstanding
Tim Gill

While she positions herself as an inside critic fed up with the excesses of the left, and as someone who embraces Marxist ideas herself, her recent work demonstrates serious confusion about the nature of exploitation, one of the most basic Marxist concepts.

Tim Gill
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru
Drew Dickerson
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru
Drew Dickerson

The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.

Drew Dickerson
A Business Doing Pleasure with You: On Becca Rothfeld’s “All Things Are Too Small”
Mitch Therieau
A Business Doing Pleasure with You: On Becca Rothfeld’s “All Things Are Too Small”
Mitch Therieau

It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.

Mitch Therieau
Where the Mind Really Wants to Go: on Sara Nicholson’s “April”
Leah Flax Barber
Where the Mind Really Wants to Go: on Sara Nicholson’s “April”
Leah Flax Barber

There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it.

Leah Flax Barber
Revisionist Histories: On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman”
Sophie Poole
Revisionist Histories: On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman”
Sophie Poole

In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman

Sophie Poole
No Desirable Life: On Eva Baltasar’s “Mammoth”
Sophie D'Anieri & Charlie Hope D'Anieri
No Desirable Life: On Eva Baltasar’s “Mammoth”
Sophie D'Anieri & Charlie Hope D'Anieri

These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats.

Sophie D'Anieri & Charlie Hope D'Anieri
Latest
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

Philip Harris
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller

As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Lucy Schiller
On Beauty and the Cleveland Museum of Art
Abigail Weil
On Beauty and the Cleveland Museum of Art
Abigail Weil

Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.

Abigail Weil
A Monument to Workers’ Thoughts: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kathë Kollwitz at MoMA
Rachel Horowitz
A Monument to Workers’ Thoughts: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kathë Kollwitz at MoMA
Rachel Horowitz

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

Rachel Horowitz
Bone Deep: Surface and Substance in May/December
Anna Krauthamer
Bone Deep: Surface and Substance in May/December
Anna Krauthamer

In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

Anna Krauthamer
Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein
Samir Chadha
Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein
Samir Chadha

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

  1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

  2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Samir Chadha
Latest
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams

I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.

Evan Williams
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman

This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.

Nik Slackman
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas

What had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade? 

Tim Thomas
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman

In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, technology scholar Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab and former green software researcher at Intel, explores the precarity of our data and digital selves.

Jacob Bruggeman
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis

The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.

Sam Venis
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons

I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.

Jackson Frons
Latest
“First Funeral in Four Months” and “On Visiting Aunt Rosa & Car Racing”
Ali Black
“First Funeral in Four Months” and “On Visiting Aunt Rosa & Car Racing”
Ali Black

I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.

Ali Black
Six Poems
Cody-Rose Clevidence
Six Poems
Cody-Rose Clevidence

of mercy, this
is the oval egg
where mercy laid waste
and, wasted, layed
down her altar

Cody-Rose Clevidence
Artificial Intelligence
Cora Lewis
Artificial Intelligence
Cora Lewis

“We can break the fourth wall. We’re writers—we do that.”

“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said.

Cora Lewis
“Smart Poem” and “Good Person”
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
“Smart Poem” and “Good Person”
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

I keep meaning to write a poem about something really smart.

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
Latest
from “Flag”
Imani Elizabeth Jackson
from “Flag”
Imani Elizabeth Jackson

I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.

Imani Elizabeth Jackson
from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
Jonathan Foiles
from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
Jonathan Foiles

I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.

Jonathan Foiles
from “Notation”
Jordan Dunn
from “Notation”
Jordan Dunn

The buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor.

Jordan Dunn
from “Anamnesis”
Caroline McManus
from “Anamnesis”
Caroline McManus

Can an object—in the form of language—seeping out of these cracks elucidate some semblance of a truth?

Caroline McManus
from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong
from “No One Knows Their Blood Type”
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Hazem Jamjoum
from “No One Knows Their Blood Type”
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Hazem Jamjoum

Death is on offer, on our screens, free of charge. Revolutions everywhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. I try to formulate my stance on each of them, but I can’t. I want to go out and declare a revolution against something, but I can’t.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Hazem Jamjoum