Jodi Dean
This idea that the Communist legacy is only one of misery and death is a remnant of the Cold War that the Left must abandon.
View ArticleAndré Aciman
Essays are all about being somewhere else. Not only in space, but somewhere else in time, as well — of having another identity, another persona.
View ArticleWill Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Will Oldham and Alan Licht
As an antidote to the self-serving, grandiose, and often grotesque nature of many “rock memoirs” Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy is a refreshing kind of book.
View ArticleCity of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud – Christa Wolf
How does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past is not even available?
View ArticleRachel Kushner
Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.
View ArticlePhilip Mosley
Hollywood invariably has trouble with unadorned representations of the poor and the disadvantaged whose life stories may not produce positive resolutions in the form of glamor, adventure, triumphant...
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...
View ArticleQ&A with Guillaume Nicloux
In fact it’s not Michel Houellebecq who interests me, but rather Michel Thomas. It’s the human, not the writer.
View ArticlePaul Buhle
There’s an element of bohemianism that speaks to a sense of political futility or at least extreme difficulty of anything like political change. That’s where we are now.
View ArticleFrédéric Gros
Nietzsche didn’t walk because he wanted to rest, because he wanted to recover from the fatigue of writing. The only way for him to feel good was to go walking, so he set out into the mountains with...
View ArticleRobert Meister – pt. 1
In colloquial terms we say possession is nine tenths of the law — well the other tenth is reparations.
View ArticleRobert Meister – pt. 2
In California belief in the goodness of our state universities is best understood as a civic religion, which makes it difficult when faculty like me and Chris Newfield try to tell the public that its...
View ArticleChris Andrews
I read Bolaño first as a general reader, then as a translator, and finally as a critic.
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