I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it.

Can one tell Twain’s story from Jim’s perspective without creating a flimsy, second-hand imitation of Jim’s voice which dooms the experiment from the start?

Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand.

African characters that go beyond the limitations of sympathy, to depict periods of upheaval where pity is a useless consolation, where we cannot generalize any specific case.

We have to rearrange our lives—to give a handful of days more weight than entire years, to give a few characters starring roles—so we can feel they are something more than administrative projects marked by disappointment.

Novels narrated through IMs or letters can manipulate the space between messages, relying on the reader to intuit the gap between what someone might be feeling and what they might be saying.

The text is interactive, necessitating the intervention of the reader for categorization of its entropic structures. Genre inflects, demands, and manages expectations anew: it’s a goddamned virus.

In the new post-apocalyptic world, the litany has been lost, the prater silenced. Catastrophe discards everything into the same junk pile of existence; which is to say, catastrophe turns everything into junk.

If the act of translation is often reduced to a dichotomy of foreignization and domestication, Dodson’s work is an interrogation; apropos of the book’s slippery relationship to the idea of national identity, of what constitutes the foreign and domestic in the first place.

The future novel resides with the fans. It will not be written from above or outside. Literature belongs to the davenport.

But if it’s impossible to determine the combination of forces that might elevate a woman to the status of It Girl, that doesn’t mean we have ever stopped trying.

An inchoate despair is the dominant mood of the novel, as Natsumi’s feelings of emptiness, dizziness, and vertigo collide against her Sisyphean rituals of domesticity.

Nothing feels like it can be trusted: the quotes, the packaging of the narrative, even the narrator herself. This, of course, makes the novel’s own point—that any telling of a story betrays much more about the speaker than the subject.

The best stories are about people who we don’t really know but think we could. Had we gone to that party we missed; had we been born without that mole.

Culpability is offloaded onto the very idea of science itself: unfeeling, inhuman, inevitable. These warnings do not allow for human ingenuity or variety of thought; they cannot imagine another way. But it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

Hašek is mocking authority and bourgeois respectability, of course, but the criticism is ultimately of the individual’s inability to tolerate being the butt of a joke. If the universe is absurd, then we shouldn’t be so foolish as to take it seriously.

The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel.

Taylor’s characters fail to reconcile deeper emotional desires with the reality that their immediate environment is not a place to escape, but rather the very territory in which “real life” happens.

Indiana’s easygoing syntax—the slippery, casual asyndeton that feels at once half-slangy and half-clinical—isn’t so much naturalistic as anthropological. But self-awareness, like an erection, is hard to keep up indefinitely.

Boy Parts displays a preoccupation with photography’s enactment of power and control.