Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Like a Phoenix or a Unicorn
At the Times Literary Supplement, Edmund Gordon shares an excerpt of The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography, about Angela Carter’s time in Japan: the vertigo-inducing flight, what she loved and loathed in Tokyo, her affair with Sozo Araki, her creative process…
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In This Hell Here With You
When people call other people crazy I don’t get mad, I get bored. When people tell me ghosts don’t exist, I just get bored. Over at JSTOR Daily, poet Dorothea Lasky writes about The Imagination, “a physical space that one…
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Women and Instrumentality
She hasn’t been shown any other options. But can she invent a new option? Over at Bookforum, Anelise Chen sits down with Alexandra Kleeman, author of the new collection Intimations, to talk about femininity, dread, and menace in her stories,…
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Always Neglected
You may see life all over the place. You may guess at things that are dying so fast… Lit Hub shares some really lovely aphorisms written by the great surrealist René Magritte, from the new volume Selected Writings out from…
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Stylistically Tortuous
If you can grope your way through late James, you’ll find you have moved out of the Victorian era into the modern and, beyond that, into what we have come to refer to as the postmodern. Over at the Smart…
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Foundations of Obscure Humanity
If the very rich were to admit that the society in which they live such lush lives is not only immoral but unnatural, it might demand, say, a massive redistribution of their wealth! Over at Lit Hub, Colette Shade writes…
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A Productive Unhappiness
Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily,…
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States of Possibility
Whenever I finish a book and I get to the last day of writing the first draft and I only have two pages to go, I put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation. That’s my ritual. Whenever I put those…
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The Book Must Be Written
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, in an amended excerpt from David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering shares his attempt at tackling the mammoth, labyrinthine task of schematizing DFW’s archival materials into a coherent history of the project that never quite…
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In Which Her Name Does Not Disappear
As I take up the task of reading and rereading these often prophetic poems, much becomes clear to me simply from the visible letters on the page—and yet I sense, too, that I cannot refuse an interpretation of what is…
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Some Kind of Deft Acceleration
Over at the New Yorker, Thomas Beller writes about reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, with its opening move-in day scene on repeat, and the ways stories change when read again and again—even and especially presidential races and speeches, as with Bill Clinton’s speech…
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Pernicious Individualism
If anything, Emerson’s transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the NSA. Over at Lit Hub, Jonathon Sturgeon writes about the supposedly rampant and undying force of individualism in American writing—the “imperial self,” an all-encompassing and socially blind thing—from Emerson…