Reviews, essays, riffs, etc. Most recent first. Updates sporadic at best.
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Third Riff)
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Second Riff)
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (First Riff)
A Too Many Cooks Riff, Focusing on The Killer, Who Is There Right from the Beginning
Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Reviewed
Stephen Collins’s Allegorical Fable The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil Reviewed
Phantoms and Ghosts in DFW’s Novel The Pale King
David Mitchell’s New Novel The Bone Clocks Falls Far Short of His Best Work
Charles Burns’s Sugar Skull Reviewed
Roman Muradov’s Enigmatic Graphic Novella (In a Sense) Lost and Found Reviewed
A Conversation About Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Part Two
A Conversation about Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Part One
What’s got into you? | Ventriloquism in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook
The BFG, Roald Dahl’s Love Letter to His Lost Daughter
A Riff on Stuff I Wish I’d Written About in the First Half of 2014
A RIFF JODOROWSKY’S DUNE (AND SOME LOVELY FILM POSTERS)
The Cranky Brilliance of Dwight Macdonald’s Midcult and Masscult
Roberto Bolaño’s The Unknown University
William T. Vollmann’s Central Europe
The Inevitable June — Bob Schofield
How can love be self-ironic? (William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central)
Laurent Binet’s HHhH Is a Thrilling Intertextual Adventure Story
“Nothing but Trouble” | Gordon Lish’s New Collection Goings Plays with the Problems of Language
“A Country On The Far Side of Fiction” — Riffing Over Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch
I Review (Version #10786 of) Nanni Balestrini’s Novel Tristano
True Detective, Bolaño’s 2666, Werewolves, Etc
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Eleventh Riff: The Nineties)
“Haunted Houses” | Another True Detective Riff
A Rambling Riff on True Detective
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Tenth Riff: The Eighties)
“A Dream About Being A Person” | Another Riff on True Detective
Immaterials, August Cross’s Contemporary Take on Goya’s Caprichos
The Abject Body and Spike Jonze’s Her
100 Point William Burroughs Riff
Please Unplease Me: A Review of Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Ninth Riff: The Seventies)
Jessica Hollander’s Collection In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place Reviewed
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Eighth Riff: Closing Out the Sixties)
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Seventh Riff: 1966)
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Sixth Riff: 1963-1964)
A Lazy Riff on Margaret Atwood’s Novel MaddAddam
Riffing Over Gerald Murnane’s Inland
S.D. Chrostowska’s Novel Permission Deconstructs the Episotolary Form
Review: Tim O’Brien’s Novel The Things They Carried, Read by Bryan Cranston
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Fourth Riff: Stories of 1962)
Riff #2 on Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters
“Horror Demands Laughter” | This Is Not a Review of Thomas Bernhard’s Novel Frost
James Wood’s The Fun Stuff Reviewed
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity Is a Worthy Sequel to Children of Men
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Third Riff: Stories of 1961)
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Second Riff: Stories of 1960)
Riff on Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (First Riff: Introductions + Stories 1956-1959)
List of Possible Descriptors for Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Against the Day
Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard’s Philosophical Novel of Abject Madness
David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche Reviewed
theNewerYork, a Worthy Alternative to Your iPhone
Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous Is a Dark, Disarming Novella
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel The Master and Margarita Reviewed
Explication/Confusion of Pacific Rim in Ten Images
The Collective Dream of the Chums of Chance (A Short Pynchon Riff)
“Smite early and often” (Another Riff on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day)
Pleasure and Sorrow in Álvaro Mutis’s Novella The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call
Riff on Goya’s Painting Highwaymen Attacking a Coach
“…he enjoyed a sort of dual existence” (Another Riff on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day)
The Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
I Review Paperback Island, Marshall Brooks’s Love Letter to Books and the People Who Make Them
A Short Riff on Shane Carruth’s Film Upstream Color
Carl Shuker’s Anti Lebanon Reviewed
Something on Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure
I Riff on the Cloud Atlas Movie
Jangly George Saunders — Tenth of December Reviewed
A Riff on Lars Iyer’s Novel Exodus
I Try to Review Ben Marcus’s Novel The Flame Alphabet
Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge Is an Elegant Collection of Creepy Intertextual Tales
A Riff on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film The Master (Including a Take on the Ending)
I Am Baffled by the Trailer for Spring Breakers, the New Film from Harmony Korine
Moby-Dick: A Short Riff on a Long Book
Flann O’Brien’s Novel At Swim-Two-Birds Is a Postmodernist Masterpiece of Comic Storytelling
I Anti-Review Evan Lavender-Smith’s Anti-Novel, From Old Notebooks
Franchise Films, Alternate Worlds, and Why Wong Kar Wai Should Direct the Next Star Wars Film
The Worst Poetry I Have Ever Read
The Special Pleasures of Guest Room Reading
A Riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tale “The Birth-Mark”
A Lazy Riff on the First Three of Álvaro Mutis’s Maqroll Novellas
A Riff on What I Read (And Didn’t Read) in 2012
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / It All Happened So Fast
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / Disconnect
Three Beautiful Books For Children (and Adults)
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / Two Short Loops
A Riff on Thomas Bernhard’s Novel The Loser
Holy Motors Is A Strange Cinematic Prayer
A Seven Point Riff on David Foster Wallace’s David Markson Essay
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / Untitled Wordless Loop
Charles Burns Enriches His Wonderfully Weird Trilogy with The Hive
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / September 23rd, 2000
I Review The Mundane History of Lockwood Heights, a Chapbook by Allen Kechagiar
I Didn’t Like Joshua Cody’s Memoir [sic]
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / I just met
Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / Branford, the Best Bee in the World
I Riff on Dostoevsky’s Novel Crime and Punishment
Three Notes on Thomas Bernhard’s Novel Correction (Plot, Prose, and a Riff)
The Hobbit Reconsidered as a Picaresque Novel
The Ring Game — Agency and Chance in Season Four of The Wire
Children Left Behind (I Riff on Season Four of The Wire)
Wherein I Suggest Dracula Is a Character in Roberto Bolaño’s Novel 2666
I Riff on Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Which I Haven’t Read (Book Acquired, 8.22.2012)
Fifty Shades of Louisa May: A Loving Biography Masquerading as a Smutty Novelty Book
“What’s Outside the Window?” (Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives Revisited)
Unknown Pleasures (I Riff a Bit on Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way)
I Review City of Glass, A Comic Book Doppelgänger of Paul Auster’s Postmodern Detective Novel
In Which I Review the Cloud Atlas Film Trailer
Intertexuality and Structure in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Roberto Bolaño’s Powers of Horror
I Audit Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (Part 3 of 3)
Some Annotations on the First Sentence of William Gaddis’s Last Novel, Agapē Agape
I Review Tom McCarthy’s Essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix”
I Audit Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (Part 1)
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Is a Perfect Audiobook
“Half Horse Half Alligator” — I Review Charles Olson’s Inimitable Melville Study, Call Me Ishmael
The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson’s Novel About Identity and Storytelling in North Korea
And I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee About Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Is a Perfect Novella
I Review the Trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Adaptation of The Great Gatsby
I Review Patience (After Sebald), an Oppressively Overstylized Documentary
Flann O’Brien’s Novel The Third Policeman Is a Surreal Comic Masterpiece
Parenting After the Apocalypse — I Review Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby
I Review Stoner, John Williams’s Sad Novel About an English Professor
Keith Miller’s The Book on Fire, A Tale of Biblioklepts, Bibliophiles, and Bibliomania
Barry Hannah’s Novella Hey Jack! Is a Loose, Hilarious Tragedy
I Review The Hunger Games Film (And Mostly Complain About the Jumpy Camera Work)
Stuart Kendall’s New Translation of Gilgamesh Restores Poetic Strangeness to an Ancient Epic
A Riff on William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
A Review of David Markson’s The Last Novel (Composed Mostly in Citations from Said Novel)
“The Priest Is Us”: The Power and The Glory, Graham Greene’s Adventure of Religion and Faith
I Review House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s Ovidian Raunchfest
Haley Tanner’s Vaclav & Lena Is A Modern Day Fairy Tale (With Lots of Lists)
Teju Cole’s Open City Is a Strange, Marvelous Novel That Captures the Post-9/11 Zeitgeist
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll — Álvaro Mutis
I Riff–Again–on William Gaddis’s Enormous Novel JR (This Time After Finishing It)
A Riff on the Kindle Fire (E-reader)
Buckaroo Banzai’s Marvelous End Titles Tell You Everything You Need to Know About This Strange Film (Film)
I Riff on William Gaddis’s Enormous Novel J R (From About Half Way Through)
I (Sort of) Review the the Trailer for Wes Anderson’s New Film, Moonrise Kingdom (Film trailer)
Riff on Recent Reading, 1.09.2012 (Gaddis, Vollmann, Dragons, Nausicaä, Patti Smith)
Horse Movies Suck (Film)
An Incomplete List of Stuff I Wish I’d Written About in 2011
Riff on Recent Reading, 12.31.2011
Books I Didn’t Read in 2011 (And Books I Will Try to Read in 2012)
Reading The Tree of Life (Film)
The Best and Worst Film Titles of 2011 (Reviews of film titles)
Riffing on Michel Houellebecq’s Novel The Elementary Particles
I Review The Avian Gospels, Adam Novy’s Dystopian Novel About Family, Torture, Rebellion, and Birds
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford — Leslie Brody
Newt’s Children, Dystopian Visions, and Greenzone America (Review of Newt Gingrich’s Child Labor Proposal)
Mister Wonderful — Daniel Clowes
Frank Miller, Fascist Mouthpiece, Is a Cranky Old Hack (Review of Miller’s Open Letter to OWS)
The Third Reich: Part III — Roberto Bolaño
A Bad Night’s Sleep — Michael Wiley
I Review Attack the Block, A Charming, Confused Film About Teens Fighting Aliens
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp — W.H. Davies
Why I Abandoned Chad Harbach’s Over-Hyped Novel The Art of Fielding After Only 100 Pages
Trans-Atlantyk — Witold Gombrowicz
Amexica — Ed Vulliamy’s Violent Chronicle of the Border Wars
War With the Newts — Karel Capek
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer — Philip K. Dick
The Garden of Eden — Ernest Hemingway
We Review John from Cincinnati, David Milch’s Metaphysical Surf Odyssey (television)
The Sot-Weed Factor — John Barth
Humiliation — Wayne Koestenbaum
Midnight in Paris — Woody Allen (film)
We Review All Six Seasons of The Sopranos in a Relatively Short Post (television)
The Tree of Life — Terrence Malick (film)
The Third Reich: Part II — Roberto Bolaño
Interviews with Hideous Men — Jessica Yu’s Documentary Protagonist (film)
The Pale King — David Foster Wallace
Light in August — William Faulkner
New in the Stack: Heinrich Böll, Vaclav & Lena, E.M. Forster, and Bob Mould
The Old, Weird America — Greil Marcus on The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
Between Parentheses — Roberto Bolaño
Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones Is Lurid Abject Art
First Love and Other Sorrows — Harold Brodkey
The Third Reich: Part I — Roberto Bolaño
In Brief: Novels from Siri Hustvedt, Katherine Shonk, and Benjamin Black
Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories — Sandra McDonald
In Brief — New Books from Gabrielle Hamilton, Meg Howrey, and Frances Stonor Saunders
How to Stop Living and Start Worrying — Simon Critchley
The Subject Steve — Sam Lipsyte
Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
The Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish (as Read by Gordon Lish)
We Review RTÉ’s Full Cast Audio Recording of James Joyce’s Ulysses
The Vintage Book of American Women Writers
Biblioklept Recommends Five Novels, Some of Them New, Not All of Them German
The Skating Rink — Roberto Bolaño
I Super Hated Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
The Lost Books of the Odyssey — Zachary Mason
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart — Lydia Millet
The Lost Art of Reading — David L. Ulin
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial — Steve Hendricks
The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3 — Hergé
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will — David Foster Wallace
The Savage Detectives — Roberto Bolaño
The Hunting of the Snark — Lewis Carroll (with Surreal New Illustrations by Mahendra Singh)
My Year of Flops — Nathan Rabin
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
New Books from Dinaw Mengestu, Stephen-Paul Martin, and Susan Straight
Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West
From Hell — Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
Aurorarama — Jean-Christophe Valtat
Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild — Lee Sandlin
An Obligatory Review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom
Red Harvest — Dashiell Hammett
Historic Photos of Outlaws of the Old West
The Mike Hammer Novels — Mickey Spillane
Uncivil Society — Stephen Kotkin
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity — J.J. Long
You Do Understand — Andrej Blatnik
Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other — NPR’s Scott Simon’s New Memoir in Praise of Adoption
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden — Helen Grant
J.M. Coetzee and Ethics — Anton Lesit & Peter Singer
The Broom of the System — David Foster Wallace
Valhalla Rising — Nicolas Winding Refn (Film)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — David Mitchell
The Thieves of Manhattan — Adam Langer
Yeah Yeah YA — New Novels from Laurence Gonzales and Simon Rich
Russian Ark — Aleksandr Sokurov (Film)
On Kindness — Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
In Brief–New Novels by Janelle Brown, Loretta Stinson, and Tracy Winn
Ethical Realism (and Grim Decadence) in Hans Fallada’s Wolf Among Wolves
In Brief — Nick McDonell, Deirdre Madden, and Simon Rich
Butterfly Stories — William T. Vollmann
The Friends of Eddie Coyle — George V. Higgins
In Brief: Beach’s Epistles, Vollmann’s Mummy Sex, and Eggers’s Wild Things
Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move and the Pleasures of Postmodern Crime Fiction
Beatrice and Virgil — Yann Martel
Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life — Steve Almond
Reviews in Brief: All the Living, The Winter Vault, and Jenniemae & James
The Delighted States — Adam Thirlwell
Reality Hunger — David Shields
“The Narrative Is the Meaning”: More on Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .
Ruby’s Spoon — Anna Lawrence Pietroni
Three Days Before the Shooting . . . — Beginning Ralph Ellison’s Posthumous Second Novel
Bright Star — Campion Does Keats (Film)
Historic Photos of Florida Ghost Towns
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned — Wells Tower
Jane Bites Back — Michael Thomas Ford
Nazi Literature in the Americas — Roberto Bolaño
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Díaz
Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview
Christmas in the Heart — Bob Dylan (Record)
A Truth Universally Acknowledged — 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen
The Paris Review Interviews, IV
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Film)
The Secret Life of Words — Henry Hitchings
Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns — Paul Green
Blood’s a Rover — James Ellroy
My Father’s Bonus March — Adam Langer
Asterios Polyp — David Mazzucchelli
The Coral Thief — Rebecca Stott
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters — Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Clean Breaks — Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Revisited
The Visitor — Jim O’Rourke (Record)
Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander
The Recognitions (Part I) — William Gaddis
Road House, Paul Verhoeven, Modern Action Films, and The Ironic Vision of the Viewer (Film)
Historic Photos of University of Florida Football–Kevin McCarthy
How Fiction Works — James Wood
Inherent Vice — Thomas Pynchon
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Film)
Harry Potter Sex Romp, Part II (Film)
Perdido Street Station/The City & The City — China Miéville
By Night in Chile – Roberto Bolaño
Last Evenings on Earth — Roberto Bolaño
Away We Go — Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida
In the Land of Invented Languages — Arika Okrent
Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors — Bill Bryson
The Belly of Paris – Émile Zola
Chicken with Plums – Marjane Satrapi
The Ramen King and I — Andy Raskin
The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald
The 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway
The Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood
Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image — Michael Casey
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Une Semaine de Bonté — Max Ernst
When Skateboards Will Be Free — Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Historic Photos of the University of Florida
The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
Three New Novels: Brothers, Amberville, and The Post-War Dream
The Ten-Cent Plague — David Hajdu
The Sunset Limited — Cormac McCarthy
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, The Perils of Assigned Reading, and A Call for Second Chances
Coraline (Film)
Child of God — Cormac McCarthy
The Nation Guide to the Nation–Richard Lingeman
The Book of Dead Philosophers — Simon Critchley
The Savage Detectives — Roberto Bolaño
The Wasted Vigil — Nadeem Aslam
The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III
Hitler’s Private Library — Timothy W. Ryback
Bourbon Island 1730 — Olivier Appollodorus and Lewis Trondheim
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: One of Our Favorite Challenged Books
Wabi Sabi–Mark Reibstein and Ed Young
Moral Relativism — Steven Lukes
In the Land of No Right Angles — Daphne Beal
Chemical Chords — Stereolab (Record)
The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories
Be Kind Rewind (Film)
Dad’s Little Helper: Malt Liquor for Grownups (Malt liquor)
To the Castle and Back — Vaclav Havel
Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
The Rum Diary–Hunter S. Thompson
Days of Heaven–Terrence Malick (Film)
Galactic Pot-Healer–Philip K. Dick
Gun, with Occasional Music–Jonathan Lethem
Southland Tales (Film)
No Country for Old Men Reconsidered (Film)
His Dark Materials Trilogy — Philip Pullman
Essential Short Story Collections: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Cannibalism and the Economy of Sacrifice in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
Essential Short Story Collections: Jesus’ Son
What I Liked About that Zodiac Movie (Film)
Historic Photos of Jacksonville
You Don’t Love Me Yet–Jonathan Lethem
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union–Michael Chabon
We Who Are Not as Others–Daniel P. Mannix
Mom and Pop are Zombies!–The Infanticidal Structure of 28 Weeks Later (Film)
Journey into Mohawk Country–Van den Bogaert and O’Connor
No Country for Old Men–Cormac McCarthy
Rescue Dawn–Werner Herzog (Film)
The Children’s Hospital — Chris Adrian
if…. — Lindsay Anderson (Film)
Old Joy (Film)
End of the Century–The Heartbreaking Story of the Ramones (Film)
Never Break the Chain–Cath Carroll on Fleetwood Mac
In the Shadow of No Towers–Art Spiegelman
Afro-Cuban Tales–Lydia Cabrera
Girl With Curious Hair–David Foster Wallace
Biblioklept 