jonathan russell clark
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An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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Rumpus Exclusive: Three Excerpts from AFTERWORDS
Three exclusive excerpts from …AFTERWORDS, a new series of distinctive commentaries on great works of contemporary literature from our friends at Fiction Advocate!
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Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be
We’ve all lent a book to someone and never gotten it back—and most of us have probably been on the other end of that exchange as well. For Read It Forward, Jonathan Russell Clark writes a manifesto against the somewhat sacred…
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Celebrating Borges’s Dual Natures
Maybe there are two Borges in the world, existing at the same time. One is the fiction writer we know, the lover of paradox, the trickster, the forger, the artist who describes fantastical events with straight-faced authority, using the syntax and tone…
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Thinking about the Past as If It Were the Future
Chuck Klosterman’s new book, But What If We’re Wrong, theorizes how today will appear in the history books. But how will his own work hold up? The further in the future you peer the more impossible it is to anticipate what…
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A Graveyard on the Shelf
Jutting out from the depths are exactly what I was looking for: bookmarks. Rows upon rows of them, in fact. But instead of alleviating my current need, the image fills me with a brief—but very real—dread. Over at Read It…
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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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Consider the Footnote
Examining yet another fundamental element of text, Jonathan Russell Clark writes an essay “on the fine art of the footnote” over at Lit Hub.
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Stop Worrying About What Comes Next
At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark analyzes several last sentences from well-known novels by Hemingway, Tolstoy, Morrison, and Roth. He pays particular attention to the craftsmanship necessary to write these sentences, and considers how last sentences work to reinforce larger themes within…
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For the Love of Chapters
What I’m talking about instead are the ways in which chapters are not merely components of a narrative’s foundational architecture but also part of its aesthetic, i.e., more like those imposing Ionic columns that both hold up the facade and…
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This Incredible Writer and Thinker and Person
For The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark covers Little Brown’s new The David Foster Wallace Reader, touching upon what he calls the writer’s “metanonfiction.” He also discusses, among other things, his hopes for the volume: … if this “Reader” accomplishes anything,…