Section
Literary Fiction
-
Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
-
“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino
“I feel that way every day of my life: ‘astray in errancy.’ I think that’s about being human.”
-
Proust Curious: “Sodom and Gomorrah”
“It was only at that moment, more than a year after her burial, because of that anachronism, which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings, that I became conscious that she was dead.”
-
To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
“What can be said with language, a human invention, about something as ineffable and ephemeral as love or desire or rage or loneliness or despair, fear of God?”
-
Proust Curious: “The Guermantes Way”
“So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one.”
-
Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward
“When I think about the novels that sort of shaped me as a younger reader, they’re often books that I call the dirt bag novel, which is sort of a reformulation of the bildungsroman.”
-
Atomic Achilles: On Benjamín Labatut’s “The Maniac”
“‘The Maniac’ isn’t interested in speculating, in the manner of science fiction, about where AI leads: whether to utopia, dystopia, or somewhere in between.”
-
To Fix the University, Return to Moo U
Every time Sean Carswell teaches Jane Smiley’s “Moo” in his research writing class at California State University, a catastrophe at the fictional Moo University mirrors a crisis within CSU.
-
Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”
-
Proust Curious: “Swann’s Way”
“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment. And houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
-
What’s a Theory to Do?
Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.
-
Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda”
“Tears of the Kingdom” lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.
-
The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.
-
The Writing “I” and the Reading “I”: Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.
-
Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty
“It’s still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing anything at all what they’re about to write.”
-
-
Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“Literature has this remarkable, almost miraculous, ability to distill human experience.”
-
Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
“What matters to me is fidelity to something else entirely, which is how human beings are and how human beings should be and the chasm between those two things, which I think is what literature is for.”
-
Eating Out in the Apocalypse
Can pleasure take place against the backdrop of climate crisis?
-
What Do the PDFs Say about This?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow
“What are the systems of power in this fictional context andthe story world I’m making? What are the stakes? What are the values?”
-
It’s Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling: Sigrid Nunez’s Animal Novels
Why are animals so central to Sigrid Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction?
