Posts by author
Adam Keller
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All Bravado, Little Spirit
For the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham writes that whatever your thoughts on the Nate Parker controversy, the new film The Birth Of A Nation is best left unseen: “Twelve Years” and, especially, “Django” promised to widen the expressive possibilities of the slave…
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One More Time
At The Millions, Shivani Radhakrishnan reviews Mauro Javier Cardenas’s novel The Revolutionaries Try Again, which takes a Soviet Montage-esque approach to budding and dissipating revolutionary impulses: You’re never directly informed about what counts as revolution and who in particular is…
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Like Tears in Rain
In a universe slowly sinking into entropy, writing can take the disordered pieces of our experience and fit their edges together into something organized. If the work of a writer is to tease out meaning from the tangled mess of life, many of…
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Crying on Cue
While it sounds pretty weird, this was standard practice back in the day. According to Patrick Miller in his article “Music and the Silent Film,” Hollywood director D.W. Griffith enlisted a brass band to encourage extras during the battle sequences of…
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Coming Home to Proust
At The Millions, J.P. Smith describes the singular effect that Marcel Proust has had on his growth as a writer: This isn’t a rambling, stream-of-consciousness book of memories lost and found; it’s a novel with a subtle and solid architecture, where…
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So Woke, Steinbae
At Timeline, Matt Reimann finds a predecessor to the modern “woke apology” in John Steinbeck’s remarks on his novel Tortilla Flat: Steinbeck’s plea here so closely mirrors the structure of the modern political correctness apology, he may well have invented…
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Inspector Gadget
For those who have fantasized about getting through the unread books on their shelf without opening them, Shawn Knight at Techspot has a writeup of a new MIT device that does just that.
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Books You Can Deadlift
At Lit Hub, Joshua Zadjman talks about Alan Moore’s Jerusalem as the new zenith of the modern doorstopper novel: What is Jerusalem? It’s an experience you can more easily press on people than explain to them. Moore’s 1,260-page second novel,Jerusalem, will land in bookstores later…
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Cold Shoulders
For Film Comment, Shonni Enelow discusses the restrained acting style present in many mainstream American films and the anxieties it reveals about emotional expression: We can see the same kind of emotional retrenchment and wariness in a number of performances by the most…
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Putting the D in PhD
An anonymous writer at the Guardian has a second career in erotica to fund their academic lifestyle, despite mixed reactions from colleagues: Colleagues in the arts react with a strange mixture of nervous supportiveness and embarrassed indifference. If I bring up the subject (in…
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Run the WorldCon
At the Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk interviews Hugo-winner N.K. Jemisin about her novel The Fifth Season and the hardline conservatives who boycotted it: It’s the same sort of reactionary pushback that is generally by a relatively small number of very loud…
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Stay Classy
At The New Republic, Malcolm Harris reviews Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction book about his stint as a substitute teacher in Maine: Maintaining classroom discipline is not high on his list of priorities, and Baker is surprised at the level of control…