An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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jonathan russell clark
20 posts
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!
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
The Hermits
For Lit Hub, Jonathan Russell Clark examines our fascination with reclusive writers.
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…
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…
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…