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On Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son Mike Birbiglia has a joke that goes, “Life is like a movie. The other day, a friend of mine from high school died. And I thought, ‘Well, I guess he wasn’t the protagonist.’” Now, I don’t know if Mike Birbiglia has read Denis Johnson. Given the number of writers inContinue reading “June 12th”

June 9th: On Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest It takes a lot for a novel to earn a title like The Dark Forest, which suggests to me an interchangeable genre work as tropily, deliciously empty as any other. I knew the book wasn’t—I had just finished the trilogy’s first entry, The Three-Body Problem, and trustedContinue reading “June 9th”

On John Berryman’s Sonnets In 2016, for my 21st birthday, I received Berryman’s Sonnets from the girl I was then dating. It was a thoughtful gift, one given by a person who cared for me deeply, and I didn’t respond with the gratitude she or it deserved. Things ended about a month later, for reasonsContinue reading “June 8th”

On Michael McDowell’s The Elementals In a world in which Shirley Jackson never wrote The Haunting of Hill House, this book still exists. It’s not as good as it is, certainly. And it perhaps boasts only one house at Beldame, not three. And perhaps more of the McCrays and Savages survive than McDowell allows to.Continue reading “June 2nd”

On Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie and Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem Before reading Mark Fisher, it puzzled me why so few of the novels or films to terrify me over the last few years have been branded as horror. It was as if one morning, without warning, I woke up, and theContinue reading “May 26th”

On Frederik Backman’s Anxious People The biggest fault I’m able to find with Frederik Backman’s Anxious People is its title, and it’s not a bad title. The people in it are anxious, after all, and it is in part their anxieties that drive them into conflict with each other. At the same time, though, itContinue reading “May 18th”

On Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir Toward the end of her 2015 guide to the art of memoir, The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr recommends penning a response to every book one reads. To paraphrase her, this practice focuses one’s critical lens, simultaneously developing one’s ability to identify the elements of craft one admiresContinue reading “May 10th”

On Russell Edson’s The Tunnel and John Langan’s The Fisherman Another pair that I finished on the same day. The first, Russell Edson’s The Tunnel, represents a selection of prose poems from his long career. The second, John Langan’s The Fisherman, is a 2016 horror novel I’ve had on my radar since its release, butContinue reading “May 4th”

On Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea A confession: I enjoyed every one of the stories in Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea. A second confession: I fully understood none of them. Facilitating this unlikely simultaneity in one’s audience is, I think, the hallmark of a great writer. And Marcus accomplishes the feat the same way soContinue reading “April 27th”

On Nabokov’s Bend Sinister and Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems, 1945 – 2005 Bend Sinister, the first novel Nabokov wrote after immigrating to America, is the sort of tale I would like to tell. In it, Adam Krug, the pre-eminent philosopher of an unnamed country, the childhood enemy of Paduk (now the leader of this country),Continue reading “April 19th”