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Chris Lehmann
In part a paean to a lost era of the great public intellectual, in part an act of public therapy, Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things is a savage look at contemporary class privilege and its often...
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Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy – Robert Pippin
[University of Virginia Press; 2012] Many recent philosophical debates about the locus of human agency have turned on very large issues: for instance, does secularism free up the possibility to be the...
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Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano is active on many fronts: he’s a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London; a writer of books such as Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and The Theatre of Production:...
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We’re Flying – Peter Stamm
[Other Press; 2012] Tr. from German by Michael Hofmann We’re Flying, an excellent new collection of short stories by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, is the author’s eighth book to appear in English. As...
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Joshua Cohen
In Four New Messages Joshua Cohen set out to write “a series of fables about life online.” The resulting stories span a wide geographical and narrative terrain, from the drug-fueled parties of...
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Casey Nelson Blake
“In every day’s newspaper there are stories about the two subjects I have brought together in this book, the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc., and the...
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Jodi Dean
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some of the most effective networks of aid came from the remnants of Occupy Wall Street. According to Jodi Dean, this is one of many examples that the radical Left...
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André Aciman
“I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British.” So begins the afterward to...
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Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Will Oldham and Alan Licht
[W. W. Norton & Company; 2012] Back in April a piece appeared on the New York Times Style Magazine blog announcing the imminent UK release of Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, with a US...
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City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud – Christa Wolf
[FSG; 2013] There are many lessons that can be drawn from the cases of the late Christa Wolf and of Günter Grass, arguably the two most important figures of post-war German literature. For decades both...
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Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has been widely lauded for its ambition, intensity, and surprising moments of humor. She recently pulled off the rare New York Times trifecta: A Books of the Times...
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The New Gods – Emil Cioran
[University of Chicago Press, 2013] Is Emil Cioran an author to be feared? Is his writing dangerous in some way that should, for example, prevent me from including his aphorisms at the end of group...
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Philip Mosley
There are few filmmakers working today like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, the sibling duo from Belguim who have, amongst their many festival accolades, directed two Palme d’Or winning films — Rosetta...
View ArticleJodi Wille
The Source Family was a high-risk situation, like any radical group or radical experiment. It was never a promise that they were going on a safe journey.
View ArticleAlgerian Chronicles – Albert Camus
In Algerian Chronicles we get both the settled position of Camus on Algerian independence and a study of what led to this exasperated tone – namely the insufficiencies of humanist principles to get a...
View ArticleGuthrie Ramsey
As someone who cares about the reputations of these musicians that I write about, I don’t want to participate in the further exiling of them to this weird corner of American music history.
View ArticleAnnemarie Jacir
I don’t consider hopefulness to be a naïve thing or just for the young and the idealistic. The people I respect the most are people that have survived some stuff and they have this hope — that is what...
View ArticleJanet Roitman
You can’t say that this object is a world with crisis and this object is a world without crisis. Empirically we can’t do that; it’s a logical distinction, we can only have crisis and anti-crisis.
View ArticleBill Cotter
In the novel, I built up the plot about halfway, and let the characters take over from there; I just watched what they did, and sometimes they did awful, gory things.
View Article20 4 420: Irie Edition
In a 1931 journal entry Wittgenstein wrote, “The works of great masters are suns which rise and set around us. The time will come for every great work that is now in the descendent to rise again.” This...
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