Mark McGurl is Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) and is currently working on a book on Amazon.com as a protagonist of contemporary literary history. (Author photograph by Ved Chirayath)
Mark McGurl
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Writing on Public Books
Feeling Like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on […]
Feeling like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on […]
The Novel’s Forking Path
Reading Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, it suddenly occurred to me why his 2005 novel Remainder is so good. It’s not the reason Zadie Smith gave in the New York Review of Books, however important that …
