Essays, Articles, & Other Stuff

LITERARY HUB

Behind the Scenes of the City on Fire Adaptation

About the uncanny experience of seeing a novel come to life on the screen, handing over the creative reins (with “a license to kibitz”), ingenious acts of translation, and more.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

What If, Instead of the Internet, We Had Xenobots?

The question this admirably bonkers and fitfully phenomenal book jazz-hands its way around is more or less the one now mooted by reality: Where does “functioning” end and life begin?

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Visions for His Daughters

Mere accidents of demography, though, can’t explain the breadth and intensity of the response to Knausgaard’s work since the first volume of My Struggle appeared in 2009.

THE GUARDIAN

How Fiction Can “Make It New”

In his 1992 novel, Texaco, the Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau fuses a vast range of materials into an epic of the dispossessed. Read a salute to this path-breaking bricolage.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Death and Taxes. Why David Foster Wallace Still Demands Our Attention

At what point did an unfinished manuscript by a writer of avant-garde commitments and Rogetian prolixity and high Heideggerian seriousness (and footnotes) become a genuine pop-cultural event?

OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY

Second Glance: Playing Lotto With Wittgenstein

Most “cult” writers find their disciples only after years of semi-obscurity; Helen DeWitt, who published her first novel The Last Samurai in 2000, found hers in the first sentence of the jacket copy.

THE MILLIONS

Occupy Parnassus!: Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good

All of which is a very roundabout way of trying to explain why It’s No Good, the first major English-language publication of the writing of Kirill Medvedev, is so necessary, and so timely. 

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Review: Even the Darkest Night by Javier Cercas

Even the Darkest Night, the first in a trilogy of novels, finds the great Spanish writer Javier Cercas trying his hand at crime.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Roberto Bolaño Recenters His Mythic World

The Savage Detectives may have made Bolaño’s name, but his posthumous publications — from the galactic 2666 to the winsome Spirit of Science Fiction — have cemented his legend. He left behind a vault to rival Prince’s Paisley Park.

GRANTA

The Meat Suit

“All life is suffering. At the zendo where Jolie went Thursdays after sixth period, not much in the way of portable wisdom got dispensed, but this was, near as she could tell, the through line.”

THE IRISH TIMES

Lucky Per: Denmark’s Nobel-winning version of the Great Scandinavian Novel

Reports of the author’s death were once exaggerated, unlike the greatness of his book, adapted by Bille August as A Fortunate Man.

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Why Write Novels at All?

Last year, I found myself mildly obsessed with a cache of YouTube clips, featuring the novelists Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Nathan Englander at a 2006 literary conference in Italy called Le Conversazioni.

THE MILLIONS

Reality Squared: A Profile of Deborah Eisenberg

If Eisenberg’s Collected Stories tell us anything, though, it’s that external measures are the least interesting kind, and, reached by phone at her New York apartment, she expresses a kind of shambolic bemusement at her achievements.

THE RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE

Garth Risk Hallberg | Organized Complexity: The Novel and the City 

The writer Garth Risk Hallberg explores the affinities between the modern social novel and the modern city. From Dickens’s London to Richard Wright’s Chicago, from the Paris of Les Misérables to the Boston of The Bostonians, the two have developed in parallel.