Running through “There’s Always This Year” is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book.

By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals.

We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.

It is both within the custom of writerly sight, then, and a cruel irony, that Berger, whose popularity is most connected to Ways of Seeing, would later come to develop cataracts in both eyes.

I couldn’t see anything but I could hear that the pasture was now moving, alive with women. I started to run before a hand stopped me, landing across my chest.

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.

Style is sexy, but without its earthly trappings—the meaty, earthy details that give texture and life to a novel—it floats away as soon as the book is shut.

disproportion
in this arranged
and animal world

Armen Davoudian’s first full-length book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, shows for the first time in far too long what meters and rhymes and inherited forms, used deftly and clearly to speak of real lives, can do.

The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies

When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.

If you are deeply offended by Bratton’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s historical masterworks into a novel about incest, addiction, and fucking, consider what he was up against.

To do so would call into question the political viability of Bertram’s poetic practice, which is stuck at the level of the model, taking it as a given and merely tweaking the parameters.

Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience.

I hugged constantly for five years. It made me a better angrier man.

From this angle, it’s almost as if the narrative itself—an ethereal ghost story and a cautionary tale about land grabs—is inconsequential to the book’s real currency: its paradoxically prominent underappreciation.

I thought it would be a fun exercise, as a means of assessing this activity over these last few months, to assign Pokemon types to each piece we published.

The Ryders are an antithesis of an aristocratic dynasty, closer to modern-day rednecks than the ancestral tradition Barnes pays homage to in her Elizabethan prose.

the invisible signals (yes) of
a net, of a rain, of a cloud—

But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love.