Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Miserable Lives, All Lit by the Neon Glow
At Harper’s Bazaar, Jason Diamond revisits the literary brat pack in the harsh morning light of thirty years later, examining their histories (real and really sensationalized) in hope of moving towards a new understanding of Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis,…
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Superman Is a Bad Translation
For Slate, Shon Arieh-Lerer and Daniel Hubbard provide a video rundown of pop culture’s use of Nietzsche, starting with contemporaneous forces made his philosophy be mangled by Nazi power and ending with True Detective and Kanye.
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World Scheduled to End This Weekend
And it’s funny—people bring up the fact that Black Wave starts out as memoir and turns into fiction, but… isn’t that what fiction is? Over at BOMB, Sara Jaffe sat down with Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave, to talk…
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Into Paradox
Over at the New York Review of Books, Peter E. Gordon writes about Søren Kierkegaard’s legacy through the lens of Daphne Hampson’s biography, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, which she dedicates to S.K. for helping her grasp “with greater clarity why…
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Who Are These Girls?
At FiveThirtyEight, Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, provides another perspective on books with “girl” in the title, complete with statistical analysis and fantastic graphs.
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Not a True Friend
…one has no idea, no idea at all, what it’s about. What’s the point of all this? What does it all mean? At Lit Hub, Claude Arnaud shares an excerpt from his biography, Jean Cocteau: A Life, focusing on the strained…
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Sticking Like Burrs
Our personal pasts aren’t factual records. They’re made up on the spot, synthesized from disjointed details to answer questions we have in the present. For KROnline, Natalie Mesnard and Patrick D. Watson work towards an excavation of memory from the points of…
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The Geography of Rock Bottom
Like, your life is falling apart and shit is pretty fucked up and you come to the conclusion that if you just split town you could chill out and be normal again. At BuzzFeed, Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave, gives…
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Dread and Magic
Isn’t the crowd itself a kind of anti-literature, an intensely physical impediment to the inwardness required of poetry and prose? At Lit Hub, Dustin Illingworth writes about literature that theorizes “the crowd,” from Don DeLillo to Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, with horror…
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All That Is Suggested of Trauma
At the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates writes about Shirley Jackson through her seminal story “The Lottery,” her contemporaneous public perception via hate mail, the figure of her presented in literary biographies, the self she expressed in essays…
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A Terrible Question with No Satisfactory Answer
For better or worse, poetry is now the only thing he likes to do. Even with the crying and the hopeless odds. Over at The Point, O.T. Marod writes about the crippling existential despair inherent in the question, “How should…
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Arendt on Trump
Evil is not one man, but rather the process of normalization via which exclusion, deportation, and finally extermination are all rendered morally justifiable. At Lit Hub, Rafia Zakaria writes an essay about Donald Trump’s rampant Islamophobia and how it can be…