Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Marginalia’s Moment
At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, S. Brent Plate discusses the place of book marginalia as we go forth into the digital age: what will happen to our…
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Intellectual Sadism
Lisa Ruddick, at The Point, gives a state of the union address on critical theory, arguing that current trends are leading us down a dangerous, anti-empathetic, anti-individualistic road towards “cool criticism”: Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal…
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Displaced in the Grotesque
O’Connor is so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody—but she was comforted by the idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the most vulnerable among us. For the Paris Review, Dave Griffith writes about reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The…
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How to Title Your Next Novel
What patterns, dreams, and desires lie hidden within the ostensible hook of a novel’s title? Dustin Illingworth, for Lit Hub, explores the keys to a successful book title after considering, among others, The Sun Also Rises. They include not using the word “Trimalchio,” and…
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So… Strange
We know we are very special. Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way? Lydia Davis has thirteen new poems at BOMB, and they show what Lydia Davis does best:…
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A Riptide in the Human Mind
What is it to read Alice, a century and a half after its creation, in the era of Guantánamo? For me, it is to understand ‘nonsense’ not as children’s fantasy but as a riptide in the human mind, which drags…
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The 100 Notables
The New York Times has released their list of notable books. If we all start reading now, we might get through at least half of them by the release of next year’s list.
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TMI, Sylvia
Better to say “I’m bad” and hope the reader responds “No, not bad, just human.” For the Guardian, Blake Morrison explores the reasons writers are so attracted to the confession, whether it be narcissism or catharsis.
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All This Craziness
It doesn’t seem right to write a novel set in the contemporary that isn’t shot through with all this craziness. For Electric Literature, John Freeman profiles Ben Lerner, MacArthur genius and author of books written by accident that revel in “privileged…
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Life with a Literary Middle Name
Yes, I thought when I was sixteen. That sounds about right. Over at the Toast, Mikaella Clements tells us the story of how she got her middle name: being escorted through the tumultuousness of adolescence by the crazed sailor Herman Melville…
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Nobody’s Expert
The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter interviews “America’s foremost public intellectual” and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates on his newfound success and public hail—which he both appreciates and is ambivalent about, it seems: The best part of writing is…