GRAVITY fails in a very American way: the lone individual triumphs over nature, energized by her sense of self-value. Americans have a history of bringing our own banalities into space with us.

I decided I wanted to lie down and have people grope me gently, as though I were Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0, unrated and uncut.

The sequencing of the stories is perfect: Leaving the Sea, in its organic development, teaches the reader how to read it.

There’s often a sort of mysticism about war, wherein war is supposed to be a kind of ineffable experience that forever separates the veteran from the civilian in ways that cannot be expressed. I’m very wary of those sorts of claims.

The sequencing of the stories is perfect: Leaving the Sea, in its organic development, teaches the reader how to read it.

There’s naked commerce, and there’s writing with a concept of the reader. That will still be an important difference when we’re all MFAs and the water rises.

The greatest merit of Little Failure is not that you’ll come out of it understanding Shteyngart, because who cares. Rather, it depicts the trajectory of immigrant assimilation in this country, and the fast disinheritance of the past that, at some point, either you or someone before you underwent to ensure that you function in the American present.

It is not uncommon in discussions of Peter Handke’s work for both Handke and literary critics to refer to a “text” of his rather than to a novel, a play, or a memoir.

There’s often a sort of mysticism about war, wherein war is supposed to be a kind of ineffable experience that forever separates the veteran from the civilian in ways that cannot be expressed. I’m very wary of those sorts of claims.

The way I see it, the only truth a fiction writer is bound by is an emotional one.

You can’t say that this object is a world with crisis and this object is a world without crisis. Empirically we can’t do that; it’s a logical distinction, we can only have crisis and anti-crisis.

Today, not only is the personal political, the personal is celebrity.

GRAVITY fails in a very American way: the lone individual triumphs over nature, energized by her sense of self-value. Americans have a history of bringing our own banalities into space with us.

Evil will stay evil. This is true in all the Coens’ work, and it may be why their movies always seem linked up with the Fates: because, unlike most of Hollywood movies, they are about life on earth.

I’m standing by books because they offer writers the space to dig in, to see if formal innovations and experiments can hold up, and provide the space for authors to take ideas to their limits.

In Louise Lawrence’s 1985 young-adult novel CHILDREN OF THE DUST, mutation becomes a queering strategy for post-capitalist, posthuman survival.

I decided I wanted to lie down and have people grope me gently, as though I were Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0, unrated and uncut.

While I understand the controversy, I wonder why more people aren’t first worried about the sleepwalker himself. I am, but that’s probably because he reminds me of someone: Robert Walser.

We need more women and more people of color to be studying, thinking, writing, and speaking about climate change. The stakes are high.

Whether or not video games are “art” has been the subject of a good amount of writing, but it would be difficult to classify Kentucky Route Zero as anything but art.