To squabble over genre would be to take away from the very potent delight of these kinds of tales: a capacity to traverse an enormous affective range, to play lightly at the surface of life and to sink to tragic human depths.

The show narrates queer and trans characters in ways that negate old tropes about being stuck in the closet in backwards small-town America. They are simply unglamorous, everyday people.

I am coming back to America. I am trying to figure out the act of being American again. There are two things I am now prepared to admit I was wrong about in relation to this: Lana Del Rey’s new Americana songbook, and Ansel Adams’s photographs of America.

When an American looks at British Literature, we see what we are not. But we also see what we are. There’s a reason Shakespeare, with his corrupt kings and upstart heroes, is so often presented as integral to the American spirit.

Every day I am more interested in the social and aesthetic lives of video games, and where those games might intersect with literature and the world.

We need a new figure to carry on the project of the cyborg, to stir our imaginations and encourage blasphemous thought. A hot-blooded thing formed from an ever-hotter world. Part animal, part man, part machine. Entirely monstrous.

It is considered unprofessional. It feels bad. It is a bad look. How is writing supposed to feel, supposed to look?

The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.

And yet, like poetry, wrestling too is a practice of excess, of the unjustifiable and the unnecessary: the costuming, the tanning, the crafting of a distinct style in service of a vision of what becomes necessary in order to get through the day or death. 

The evening you refused to sleep, we were over a hundred miles away from our home in Cleveland. A Rust Belt city to which—because of you—your mother and I will forever be tethered. 

For the critic-comptroller—the spectator hoping to take absolute measurements and gain new and unambiguous knowledge from the show—the works on view inspired both hyper-focused reading and diverted desire.

Close listening, much like close reading, requires focused, sustained attention to how a story is told, not merely its plot. The work of healing, if not the biophysiological process of cure, is fundamentally narrative in practice.

It’s fitting that ecstasy’s Greek root means to literally “be beside oneself,” as in the soul exiting the body. Rubens wasn’t wrong: death, near-death is a preemptive condition of the ecstatic.

There was one literary magazine that made you write “THE END” at the end of your story, to signify that when the writing was done, when there were no more pages or writing, it had ended to these idiots or robots.

What I needed was to connect the best way I really knew how: by talking about books, sharing feelings about a story with someone, and through those discussions learning how their mind works and in turn my own.

An undercurrent of low-grade moral panic is at the crux of both the fascination with and knee-jerk disparagement of SAHGFs: in their own words, they have gone soft and vocally do not wish to succeed in any kind of career.

During the years I had cancer, I sometimes bristled at the language of “wellness” and its trappings. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed oxaliplatin.

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?