Reviews

Radiohead – Mylo Xyloto

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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.

Zone One – Colson Whitehead

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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.

Hav – Jan Morris

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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

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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selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee – Megan Boyle

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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?”

Lost Memory of Skin – Russell Banks

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Through his supporting cast, Banks suggests that most individuals are not unlike the Kid – burdened by compromised morals, predatory and voyeuristic instincts aroused by barrages of sexual images.

The Outlaw Album – Daniel Woodrell

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These characters live in a liminal world between humanity and animality—it’s a world of random cruelty, unresolvable loss and loneliness, poetic revenge and equally poetic semi-articulacy.

House of Holes – Nicholson Baker

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Perhaps in the economy of desire, this is what capitalism with a human face looks like in its most utopian form.

Reamde – Neal Stephenson

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Reamde finds itself reveling in gun violence, a preoccupation not only with the the typical drama of cover fire and heads exploding under a sniper’s hail, but with the geeky details—hammers, safeties, gauges, and even idiosyncrasies of certain models of pistol. It is unflinching, unquestioning, and ultimately not very much fun.

We Others – Steven Millhauser

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At their most compelling, these recent stories address Millhauser’s preoccupation with the intersection between expectation and disappointment, sensuality and revulsion.