Long-Sleeved Kimono Double Suicide, 2013 by Ikenaga Yasunari (b. 1965)
Birthday, 1999 by John Currin (b. 1962)
Woman II, 2016 by Natalie Frank (b. 1980)
Barry Moser’s illustration for Lynne Reid Banks’s “The Hare and the Giants.” From The Magic Hare, Avon, 1994.
Donning the Ceremonial Death Shirt, 2016 by Samual Weinberg
June Night, 1949 by Henry Koerner (1915-1991)
Blondie Bubba and the Red Porch, 2016 by Jamie Adams (b. 1961)
Chase by Dragan Bibin (b. 1984)
Untitled (Hiveman) by Gervasio Gallardo (b. 1934)
Soldier’s Granddaughter, 2004 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
The Vagabond, 1845 by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
Hercules and the Cattle of Geryon, c. 1537 by the Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder
Schloss Kammer on Lake Attersee I, 1908 by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Scar Tissue of Lies, 2016 by Katherine Kuharic (b. 1962)
Coping, 2008 by Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965)
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 