Good, Bad, and the Complete Opposite: Cynicism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema
Cantinflas is the inheritor of millennia of cynicism, a philosophy “pioneered” by the barrel-living, work-scoffing Diogenes.
No Consolation: On Gabriel Blackwell
Almost everyone in the world of Blackwell’s fiction finds themselves trapped in the process of unintentionally suffocating both their significant others and themselves.
I wanted salvation without the fall; I wanted art to save me from life.
Messina’s writing is bleak and tender and honest and is not trying to persuade me of anything, least of all that things will work out.
Against Safe Sex: A Review of Kathleen J. Woods’s White Wedding
To ask whether the pornographic narrative style does anything (and to value it accordingly) is to buy into the promises of virtuous consumption. It is to believe that consuming a book somehow transforms aesthetic experience into social action.
Daria Morgendorffer, Jodie Landon, and the Privilege of Cynicism
Why is cynicism so seemingly tied to whiteness?
The Maladaptation of White Noise
Perhaps there is a tablet, a Dylar that actually works, that would make me forget Baumbach’s movie as the Gladneys wanted to forget death.
“Within Spitting Distance of the Exit”
Some people will go to the ends of the earth for closure, while others maintain until their last, hypertensive breath that it doesn’t exist.
The coven is not only a ritual meeting of practicing witches—it is an aspirational design for the literary establishment.
The Dissenters is not a novel of exile: It is an Egyptian novel in English.