Reviews

Nicholas Dames

On the exhausted reader

Käthe Kollwitz, Tod und Frau, um das Kind ringend . 1911, etching. 9 × 11”.

Kate Briggs. The Long Form . Dorothy, 2023.

Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno. Tone . Columbia University Press, 2023.

Every cultural moment has its favorite, iconic reader types, its fantasies that become part of the self-awareness of the actual reader — of you, reading. The lineage is a long one, and you can usually file every new caricature under an old category: Pensive-Thoughtful; Furtive-Masturbatory; Intent (with scholarly and religious subvarieties); Eager-Youthful-Radical. In my own reading over the past year, a new category has seemed to open up: the Exhausted. The almost-burned-out, frayed, fried, edge-of-collapse reader, just barely keeping it together.…