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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water

I finished The Time of Cherries on a severely delayed Amtrak train, at the very moment when I felt something akin to Roig’s “chaos of hopelessness.” The summer was off-kilter, with an endless deluge of “unprecedented events” playing out on newsfeeds and televisions. Flashes of abnormality, lighting up phones, tickering across widescreens, punctuated the dullness of long, excruciatingly hot days.

It is left unclear, intentionally, where the translation of imagination ends and the translation of language begins. Instead, from the Portuguese novel, we learn that the English narrator is unreliable only in the sense that she is a writer, tasked with the impossible undertaking that is replicating experience.

We understand, through the haze of her so extremely un-Cusk-like uncertainty, exactly why she turns to both gender and visuality in the two novels she’s written since. She is looking for a way out.

Celan pushes what is light and human in his work into the background, to bring tragedy to the fore. Tawada does the opposite, pushing tragedy into the background to foreground what is light and human. Paul Celan and The Trans-Tibetan Angel is where they meet.

She scrutinizes her mother’s every move, as we watch her notice her mother’s failings for the first time.

Like any good parent, Zambra wants to keep some kind of record to ward off forgetting.

Withdrawn into his tower, pacing the crumbling battlements as he waits to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, Coetzee has given himself over fully to arid intellectual games.

Perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style.

Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches. 

The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.

What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?

By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology.

What Mobility offers is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context.