Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen My reading has been lagging, lately. Never has my life felt more static. Nor more charged. I’ve been sleeping less, drinking more. I am wildly, frighteningly happy. I am moving to Manhattan in two months, and this is the smallest of my joys. The other day, I stole this, which itselfContinue reading “August 13th”

On Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation I’m also reading Thacker’s Infinite Resignation right now, and his pessimism has permeated my responses to everything else I read. Gloom and doom—and even more so the paralysis they can induce—have never struck me as so inevitable, so rational, as they do now. InContinue reading “August 6th”

On Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation  I finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation while lying on my back in a park in Harlem, sleepy with sun. An hour before, I had put in a deposit securing the apartment for which, three days later—today—I’d sign a lease. A couple on the lawnContinue reading “July 30th”

On Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper I spent much of my childhood using rotting apples to knock unripe apples from the trees in my grandmother’s backyard. My cousins and I—sixteen of us, in all—would surround that trio of gray-barked ancients, bare-chested, redolent of grass clippings and chlorine. OurContinue reading “July 26th”

On Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties I’ve been listening to a lot of Car Seat Headrest lately, and I’ve landed on two theories as to why. The first is that Will Toledo, the band’s (now thirty-something!) frontman, is aContinue reading “July 19th”

On Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem’s 2013 lament of the death of American communism, did its best to de-convert me. For the first two-thirds, I suffered through erudite slang of the guiltiest sort, Pynchonesque runs of Brooklynisms and Jewish jargon, desperate for a reason to care.Continue reading “July 13th”

July 6th: On Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves and Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon By the end of the first chapter of History of Wolves, it’s obvious (or so we believe) what the story’s about. The setting: a backwoods town in northern Minnesota in which nothing much at all occurs. Mr. GriersonContinue reading “July 6th”

July 1st: On Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings There was a time in my life—say, second through eighth grade—when I would have hated this book. Dragonwings: the title promises a tale more explicitly fantastic. I would have cracked it with the expectation of swords and sorceries, apocryphal histories, elves. And instead I would have had my heartContinue reading “July 1st”

On Jenny Offill’s Weather, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, and Sandra Scofield’s The Last Draft I’m reading Sandra Scofield’s The Last Draft right now, which samples one of the more famous bits of The Great Gatsby as an example of the transcendence possible through a detached, observant first-personContinue reading “June 30th”

On Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and Liu Cixin’s Death’s End Death’s End was difficult for me to finish. As the final entry in Liu Cixin’s heralded Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, it had a lot to wrap up—and it looked the part. Six-hundred-plus pages, and in them the promise of a resolutionContinue reading “June 23rd”