They’re a potent reminder that we still live in the long, dark shadow of the twentieth century—the bargains made therein, the general Faustian demeanor accepted as a national character—and that a certain kind of serious, Modernist fiction still has a place and resonates.

But we’re ready to set sail for summer, and we hope these pieces, this review-in-review, have persuaded you that we’ll be here again in three months, in a year, in a decade, bailing and assessing the course.

Against this backdrop, it was only a matter of time before the gospel of flat design spread to the publishing industry. But what does “frictionless experience” look like in book form?

On my television set, Calum sits naked at the edge of his hotel bed, sobbing uncontrollably until his body convulses into a familiar shiver. You can’t see her, but it’s implied that his young daughter Sophie is somewhere nearby, witnessing her father’s breakdown.

From the crumbly yellowed 50s-era pages, out came tumbling the most delicate assortment of objects: a collection of movie tickets for the Cleveland Cinemathèque, an unsent letter to a “K” about a dream that the writer “T” had, and the fragment of a short story that had been clearly abandoned.

You’re a poet who’s been at it for a while: you’ve published ten or fifteen books over thirty or forty years, and you’ve won prizes. You’ve had critics call you an Influence. But not lately.

Attention Library: the phrase verges on redundancy. But unlike in most libraries, where the act of attention is a means to an end, in this Library attention is the main attraction: one visits the Milcom Room to attend, as it were, to attention itself. Is such an exercise possible?

“Next Year” can still be exciting to us because of how it occupies the material it’s made with, and what that kind of occupation might have to say about the way we read both poems and calendars.

The switch from adventuring to gardening’s a growing up: the hero sets out as witness, one who has read knight’s tales and is instigated to action. Reader becomes writer; on return, the hero testifies to the history of his vision.

Have I just described a typical scene in a Harold Pinter play, or an especially difficult moment of interaction for an autistic person? 

The show wants to ask: they were decent apples once, so why did they go bad?

Using serious modes and channels to critique writers like Franzen only legitimizes them as serious people to be debated. What better consolation than to shitpost?

This is The West, I think: where fantasy displaces the real for profit. As a transplant to the state of Texas, I have a strange desire to see that displacement, which is why I’ve come here, expecting the Marfa Invitational to bring this phenomenon into stark relief. 

We are, in both cases, witness to something we ought not to see. In the moment, we are standing where we ought not to stand. In the trespass and the violence, we are the viewers and the participants.

Intellectual uncertainty turns out to be a hallmark of masklophobia.

There's an inherent bias in our fiction-making against the mysterious, the uncanny (style—not narrative). For all the left-leaning of the literary industrial complex, there's a rampant conservativism in its language.

We are in the midst of the MLB playoffs, baby, and the Cleveland Guardians (neé Indians) are, for the moment, in it. And I want that to mean more than it does.

At its best, Climate Change as Class War reads as a potential roadmap for the climate politics that lies beyond liberalism’s shortcomings.

To go back to the comfort that is childhood reading, before it was ruined by us high school teachers—back when we could both get lost in a marvelous book and finish it in an afternoon.

Since at least the French colonial occupation of the 17th century, the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM), that grand region spanning the middle of North America including parts of both the US and Canada, has maintained an unprecedented network of production and exchange of global importance.