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Some books take such a mammoth effort to produce that it’s hard to want to be critical of them. Rolling Blackouts is one of those books. The nearly 300 pages of delicately crafted, watercolored panels make evident that Sarah Glidden is a workhorse of a talent. The dialogue—which is mostly transcribed from conversations—is incredibly natural and nuanced; […]
...moreTo memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with artistic expression as the aestheticization of truth, almost necessarily a “mangling,” when the goal is […]
...moreFor the second time that day, then, I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin. If you haven’t seen Charlie Kaufman’s new film Anomalisa, we highly recommend that you do. And then after, read this wonderful piece by Zadie Smith on Kaufman, The Polar Express, Schopenhauer, and the uncanny […]
...moreThe critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession with freeing minds, which quickly become isolated monads.
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Garth Greenwell discusses his debut novel, What Belongs to You, crossing boundaries, language as defense, and the queer tradition of novel writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and essay and autobiography.
...moreArt shouldn’t be mere normalizing sublimation or queer desublimation, which amounts to the same thing. Should actually make your problems worse. Only then can the fantasy of endless role-playing and analysis be traversed. Art is, in this way, less delusional than psychoanalysis. The Believer Logger interviews poet, performer, and critic Felix Bernstein about art and pathos.
...moreLisa 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 kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the […]
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Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Author Sarah Tomlinson talks about ghostwriting, her father and childhood, the tradition of confessional writing, and her new memoir, Good Girl.
...moreIrony abounds in a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Jonathan Gottschall, the pioneering figure of Literary Darwinism, who has taken to MMA fighting since his career as an academic foundered. Gottschall made a splash in literary circles with a dogmatic assertion that the lens of evolutionary biology can and should supercede all other […]
...moreNew Jersey is about to get Poststructural, thanks to Princeton’s recent acquisition of Jacques Derrida’s library. The collection contains nearly 14,000 books, many of which bear marginalia from the celebrated critic and philosopher. The collection will be available to scholars at Princeton’s Firestone Library.
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Zach Savich reviews William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetrytoday in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreDown at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh asks where the black critics are (and whether we ever had any to begin with, and how the field is irrelevant until they come back): Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known […]
...moreThe more all-encompassing art is becoming, the more we need criticism. The more books there are, the hungrier we are for a way to navigate the field. The more of other disciplines the visual arts take on – poetry, dance – the more we need critics to research, think through contexts and presentation, and, yes, […]
...moreDavid Ulin at the LA Times makes interesting argument for retiring the word “brave” from jacket copy. Citing its overuse and the seeming dissonance of describing literature as brave in the face of countless acts of bravery in the world beyond books every day, Ulin argues that we do our authors a disservice with language that […]
...moreArt isn’t just for fans, which means that it’s not just for the knowledgeable, but for passersby as well. Expertise, then, seems an excuse to make everyone talk about the same things in the same way. For the LA Review of Books, Noah Berlatsky writes about ignorant commenters, outsider critics, and elitist experts and argues […]
...moreIf you’re ready to join a writing workshop or you’re thinking about it, you’ll surely want to know what may happen to you while attending one. That’s why Amy Klein compiled on a handy glossary of commonly-uttered workshop criticisms along with their true, ruthless meaning.
...moreCan a good critic be a good novelist too? Daniel Mendelsohn and Leslie Jamison, who both have written both fiction and non-fiction, answer this question in the weekly Bookend column for the New York Times’s Sunday Review. Though their ideas differ, the two authors ultimately share the same point of view, summed up in Jamison’s statement that, […]
...moreWomen’s work has always been awesome, just as the work written by people of color, minorities, and other classes of people who aren’t white men has been. The work of white men has been awesome, too, but it has benefitted from a system where their work has been assumed awesome, rather than graciously granted the […]
...moreAn artist’s work can take years to complete, while a critic’s take on said art can be formulated in a matter of hours. This distinction is pointed out early on in Richard Brody’s discussion of criticism at The New Yorker. Brody does not argue that critics should be considered inferior to artists, rather that they […]
...moreDo you still remember the Internet of last week, just another barrage of all-over-the-place political and cultural events in which millions of people watched, reacted and interacted online?
...moreAt The Book Beast, Sean Manning wonders why The New York Times Book Review “would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.”
...moreLong time Rumpus Reviewer Barbara Berman examines the two latest offerings from critic Helen Vendler, one on Emily Dickinson and the other on the last books from five of the 20th century’s finest poetic voices.
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