Letting Go of What We Should Have Had: Adam Phillips’s On Giving Up
We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
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Thomas Larson
9 posts
Thomas Larson is a writer and critic. His website features 400 publications as well as information about his four books and his latest work. He lives in San Diego, CA.
The Anger of Memory: Teju Cole’s Tremor
In this, Cole has taken the "tragedy" of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.
“How Literature Saved My Life,” by David Shields
Something similar about desire and resistance to desire is going on with David Shields, a core theme begun in Reality Hunger and now extended with How Literature Saved My Life. Dramatizing uncertainty, in authors Shields devours and lauds (think Geoff Dyer on D. H. Lawrence), is a new, largely nonfictional form, doggedly essayistic, bleedingly memoiristic. This genre amalgam is displacing traditional literary categories, especially the novel, “an artifact,” Shields writes, “which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.”
Zona, by Geoff Dyer
To appreciate Zona, Geoff Dyer’s twelfth book, you’ll need to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, among the most treasured and troubling movies in the history of cinema. If you’ve…
Write What You Don’t Know
Ann Beattie’s collagist new novel, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, questions the inherent value of fiction.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Perhaps the glue of cruelty’s hold is not its “art” but its performance, its visceral slap, its full-frontal assault.
THE BLURB #21: This Is Your Brain—on Books, on Screens
After just five hundred years of movable type and the Enlightenment it begat, we are blinded by how brief our dwelling in the kingdom of print turned out to be.
You Know Nothing of My Work!
Douglas Coupland’s new biography of Marshall McLuhan bends the rules of the medium—but what, exactly, is the message?
From Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.