Indiana’s easygoing syntax—the slippery, casual asyndeton that feels at once half-slangy and half-clinical—isn’t so much naturalistic as anthropological. But self-awareness, like an erection, is hard to keep up indefinitely.

Graham’s poems do not merely describe images of the near future, Anthropocene industry and loss, but enact its immediacy with energetic bursts of syntax contending with their afterwards, their silence: “—& where // does it go now / when it goes away”

Boy Parts displays a preoccupation with photography’s enactment of power and control.

Power doesn’t always come from brute force; in many cases it operates through obfuscation and mystification. Illuminating all of this is the easy part, of course. The challenge is figuring out how to empower the people who work under these conditions.

The book is organized around four city slogans, Queen City of the Lakes, City of Good Neighbors, City of Light, and City of No Illusions—taking the reader through a communal memoir that mirrors that of my family.

Failure, then, is a tonic for hubris, a lesser ward against the performative narcissism of perfection we wear as both shield and mask to navigate these craven times.

There’s also the question of genre itself: there’s an established tradition in American letters of privileging storytelling over truth-telling when it comes to what we might call literary journalism.

As music critics we struggle to separate ourselves from the social media cavalcade, hurried by deadlines, aggrandizing our own curation and tastes. Christgau is blissfully unconcerned with any of that.

A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, but these poems are after something different.

The novel is a lackluster examination of plagiarism, privilege, and cultural appropriation that is too assured of its own righteousness; that fails, in its moral assertions and limp characterizations, to conclude anything besides the painstakingly obvious.

Solid writing is for cowards, after all. True commitment to storytelling lies in speedrunning as many tropes as possible.

There is an insistence to the art required of this stillness, this refusal to act, and the attention to quotidian detail it both enables and depends upon.

Zambreno shares my want, which is Cornell’s want: to hone in on the shifting gradations of light and temperature throughout the day by being present to the world and those within it.

Doom Town is the rare text which is actually narratologically deconstructive, insofar as it is a text awkwardly sutured around a central aporia. But then, too, it recognizes one cannot deconstruct without then reconstructing, even though reconstruction is little more than imposition.

Diego Garcia is a ledger of annulments, which in its constant doubling back achieves a kind of fiction that is obsessed with the conditions of its conception.

This artificial sickness is a feminized purgatory that entraps and entrances, freeing its denizens from both the real world, which is cruel, and the promised land, which doesn’t exist. The recovery suite becomes the ultimate VIP room, and you have to show skin to get in.

Yet if the source of this confusion is undefined, it is because Dazai’s characters only subscribe to the first half of the trad’s mantra: they reject modernity, but they do not embrace tradition.

Slobodian reveals that dreams of elite dominion have drawn on fantastical, even magical, thinking. They’re predicated upon chaos and apocalyptic anxieties, both as preconditions for the reconfiguration of the world according to narrow, private interests and as drivers of paranoid self-seeking.

The past is dead, but Cixous is alive, and she resurrects only what she thinks of, what incites her, what comes to her mind. Through this persistent act of journeying, the grand gesticulations of the twentieth century come to be concentrated in the beloved, diaphanous figure of a woman: her mother.

Within this framework, the city of Flavortown becomes a kind of fraught retreat into global branding through which regional identity can be defended and maintained.