Book Club: The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector – DAY 1
Day 1 of an in-depth dialogic inquiry into Clarice Lispector’s short fiction, in which her embrace of the body, linguistic innovations, and interrogations of gender, sexuality, and the boundaries of the human are discussed.
Encyclopedic Encroachment: Defining the Micro-enyclopedic Novel
Each encyclopedia has its own white whale.
Unreal Loyalties in the Museum
Old-guard museum loyalists have come to associate photography of artworks with inattention and disrespect. But that attitude is itself unfaithful to the possibilities of the museum.
I don’t actually know where my faculties are
Platforms like Facebook require consistency between one’s online and offline selves. But maybe there’s something unnatural about trying to force this consistency.
Unselfconsciousness is covetable. We admire it in babies and seek to recover it as adults. But blackness is incompatible with unselfconsciousness. Blackness is a tracking device.
For a brief moment in the cemetery, I wished it wasn’t my inheritance. That this wasn’t my story.
The Indescribably Real: Epic Memoir and Barycentric Fiction
The softening of the reader’s criteria for what can be permissibly worked into the novel format, processing real life through the story-teller’s eye for structure, implicates not only our literature, but reality as we experience it.
Nell Zink’s prose may not expand into rolling curls of unconventional syntax, but it is nonetheless difficult. Her mercilessly enjoyable prose leaves itself open to serious moral misinterpretation.
This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time
There are dawns and noons and nightfalls, diseased interludes and riots and political turns, seasons of tumors and cures and poisons, and along with these the daily need to reproduce oneself as a living person.
The Perils of Optimism, with Zeppelins
Truth itself won’t be comforted, but there’s solace in seeing the huckster unmasked. On American optimism and THE CARP CASTLE by MacDonald Harris.