On Roberto Arlt’s THE SEVEN MADMEN
Before you read it, you might see a quote from Roberto Bolaño on the back cover: Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. You can ignore the blurb; you can have an original relationship with the book. Maybe this is what you should do.
Apple and the Aesthetics of Empty Aspiration
Apple has absorbed the imagery of political resistance and the consumerist promises of technological innovation into a single, aspirational aesthetic.
What Twitter Does to a Novel; What a Novel Does to Twitter
I started the account with hopes the daily dips into the book would help me figure out a way to teach such an odd text, but I really learned that the novel is great for Twitter for the same reason it’s not so great for college freshmen.
In the creative cities model, liberty precedes equality and fraternity. The latter two are said to follow close behind, but the logic of the lie has been exposed time and time again, city by city.
Our favorite features from 2015, spanning topics from dinosaurs in philosophy to hucksterism in American literature.
Critics have put forth a few names, but so far there is no Next Bolaño yet. Not in terms of global readership or consensus, at least. So how are anglophone readers to know what Latin American literature commands our attention?
The work of being in pain every day is a form of manual labor in which the hours are unpredictable. The manual labor of being in pain every day is precarious because it is not a job you are paid to do, but a job that you pay to do, with your attention.
If James Bond is a sharply-dressed state-sponsored killing machine, Jason Bourne is his moral opposite — the machine gone haywire, resisting its programming.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought? Is it what we have written? What part of the self browses the Internet? What is that self trying to get to?
Art & Algae: The Work of Anna Atkins
As we face an accelerating environmental crisis in this century, Atkins’ seaweed impressions remind us about extinctions past and present, those erasures and absences yet to come.