Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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The Reality of Absolution
Over on the National Book Critic Circle’s blog, Sam Sacks relays his experience reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, both as a teenager and an adult desperate to believe in a distance between his present self and that teenager. Both a…
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The Academic as (Insufferable) Hero
Cagey and brainy, Bellow wanted to be the novelist of both the streets and the faculty lounge. Alas, in too much of his work, he serves as a cautionary tale of how schools can open minds but can also sometimes…
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Perhaps the Greatest Pleasure
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great…
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Good ol’ Gregor Brown
Kafka’s Metamorphosis just had its centennial anniversary; to celebrate, Lit Hub has brought us a lovely comic by R. Sikoryak, combining beloved Charlie Brown with beloathed Gregor Samsa. The results are fantastic.
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How Do You Contend with the Hubris?
For Salon, Teddy Wayne interviews six prominent authors on what has shaped their thoughts into word: with Lauren Groff, Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Matthew Salesses, Steve Toltz, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
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Summer Swimmer’s Lament
Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone dives into John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” a story with well-deserved fame in the literary community, exemplary of Cheever’s style and a perfect read with which to mourn summer’s end.
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Willa Cather on Happiness
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. Brain Pickings shares with us a beautiful little vignette from Willa…
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Claudia Reigns Queen
If you want to know what the effect that book has had on me, that’s the effect. I don’t care if you think I’m an angry black woman. I don’t care if you think I’m making you feel uncomfortable. I…
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Got to Pg. 359 and Stopped Reading
So why has Infinite Jest, supposedly such an influential novel, become a paper weight, a talking point, a bench-mark of high- and low-brow intellectuality? Why has no one (or, more accurately, why does everyone think that no one) has actually…
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A Complete Fantasy
I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves, and how they may conflict with other people’s stories about the world, and how, if we’re operating under a delusion, we might make really weird decisions. I like to explore that in…
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Lolita Landmarks
Over at Lit Hub, Rebecca Brill has traced Lolita’s 62 years of history “from transgressive lit to pop iconography,” from inception to Kubrick to Lana Del Ray’s obsession on Born to Die. Maybe we’re just a little closer to understanding the…
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Narrative Dependencies
People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. For the Atlantic, Julie Beck presents us with a thrilling article on narrative psychology, providing some scientific basis for that brilliant statement by Joan Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order…