By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very…
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and then collapsing, newspapers going online-only and then…
Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award.
The feminists got headaches and worked so relentlessly that they forgot to eat. They smoked too much and made half-hearted attempts to quit. They sent each other presents — articles of clothing, a copy of the latest pamphlet from the Radicalesbians.…
Maybe you know the drill: metahistorical intrigue and antiauthoritarian politics; several deep benches’ worth of quirky characters toting loudly emblematic affectations and not-strictly-probable names; song-and-dance numbers with rhythmically typeset…
April Zhu: Let’s start with the charges. UnHerd columnist Kat Rosenfeld wrote that we editors who resigned in protest had reached with our “hot little hands” for “the censor’s pen.
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities?…
Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes.…
It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week.…
“Don’t write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,” Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: “You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.” I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form.…
Kadare responded to political criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation.…
Thank you to the poets, the story writers, the novelists, the essayists, the memoirists for your words that have lifted us toward the light. You remind us to slow down and be awed, to feel that unique joy in wondering about what we don’t know.
The teleprompter is certainly not as important as the flag pins, the red tie, the red hats and all the other visuals of the MAGA movement. But it offers an interpretive key to the moment.
Like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness.…
Sometime in 1997 Beth Stryker, who was one of Shulamith’s younger friends, sent us the manuscript. Would Semiotext(e) like to publish Shulamith Firestone’s new, second book? I think we said yes right away before even reading it.…
What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t…
Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself,…
