These are links to some of the longer pieces I’ve written so far this year. The painting of the great Indian fruit bat (c. 1777-1782) is attributed to Bhawani Das or one of his followers.
The Last Jedi and the anxiety of influence
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread
A review of The Paris Review’s overproduced podcast
A review of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s collection Narcotics
A few paragraphs on beginning Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a compelling Stephen Crane character
A review of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a particular Gordon Lish sentence
On rereading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Goya’s painting The Straw Man
On Don DeLillo’s novel The Names
On the radical postmodernism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Polygamy as a metaphor in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “silvery veil” — and David Foster Wallace’s Madame Psychosis
An analysis of William Carlos Williams’s ekphrastic poem “The Wedding Dance in the Open Air”
A close reading of Lydia Davis’s very short story “Happiest Moment”
On a passage from Gerald Murnane’s short story “Stream System”
Something on a scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On John Berryman’s Dream Song 265
On making a literary cocktail, the sherry cobbler
On Robert Coover’s short story “The Brother”
On Claire-Louise Bennett’s short story “Stir-Fry”
On Balthus’s portraits of young girls reading
On the postmodern comedy-horror axis of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy
An interview with the editors of Egress, a new literary magazine devoted to innovative writing
A completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels
Antoine Volodine’s Writers blows me away
A review of Dave Cooper’s queasy abject comic Mudbite (at The Comics Journal)
On Michael Radford’s film adaptation of 1984
Is The Running Man a good film?
On William Friedkin’s paranoid, claustrophobic horror flick Bug
Mary and the Witch’s Flower, a love letter to Studio Ghibli from director Hiromasa Yonebayashi
On Hayao Miyazaki’s film Porco Rosso
A review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon
Biblioklept 