While Lolita’s Humbert Humbert is a complex and twisted subject, Lamb is inscrutable and grimly determined. A sacrificial namesake might have been more empathetic and intriguing to follow, but a simple wolf in sheep’s clothing stalls at unsettling.
Galore is a novel of total fidelity between word and world, the kind of novel that invents its own language, that teaches us how to read it, and that makes our own words feel inadequate.
Apricot Jam – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
While Solzhenitsyn’s early work was engaged in uncovering the hidden reality of a still-existing system, this later work, a fascinating dive into the tragedy and absurdity of the most recent century, is engaged in the act of processing the past.
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire – Will Hermes
New York itself is every bit as interesting as the music Hermes discusses. It’s old, it’s huge, and it is a perennial hub for music. It’s also volatile and mercurial, which makes it a compelling character in Hermes’ narrative.
Garner explores the troubling demystification that results from understanding—the lurch of realigning one’s imagined truth with someone else’s reality.
No strangers to bold reintroductions, Radiohead’s quest to debunk themselves — and presumably all of pop music — takes its sharpest turn at Mylo Xyloto’s 44-second mark.
We can take the country we live in and extrapolate a future wherein corporations have removed the thin veil between the seats of power and themselves and still be just as lost as we were before we made that leap.
Reading Hav forces you to wonder what’s “real” and what’s “fake” while simultaneously realizing that the distinctions between real and fake, true and false, are arbitrary, shifting, and hazy.
You Deserve Nothing – Alexander Maksik
Despite Will’s lessons to his students from Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sartre, the saddest lesson of all, the most haunting, is always your failure to live up to other peoples expectations, not to mention your own.
selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee – Megan Boyle
It’s the self as self; as whatever it is. A little thing. Not much, as Lyotard says. The book is a constant reminder of this not-much self. A window into one tiny noumena (as Lin has written) and thereby an occasion to wonder “what am I right now?”