Reviews

Everything I Write is True, But So What?: Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait

- | 5
If you’re looking for a way to ruin a perfectly good first date, do the following: lean forward in your chair and, gazing urgently across the dinner table into the eyes of the near-perfect stranger sitting opposite, ask them to tell you something true about themselves.
- | 5
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Essays Notable Articles

The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’s Guide to Classic Video Games

- | 80
The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide.
- | 80
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In Memoriam

Remembering Hitch

- | 4
It took a particularly potent kind of charisma to allow a person to engage in such concentrated namedropping, urinating all the while, and still manage to come across as utterly charming. Hitchens had that kind of charisma.
- | 4
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Mark O’Connell

- | 7
His compassion and clarity are such that I often found myself thinking that if God existed and had sat down to write a novel, this is what it would look like.
- | 7
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Essays

The Saddest Story I Have Ever Heard: An Agnostic Appreciation of The Book of Genesis

- | 6
When I think of poor Adam and Eve and their hapless abdication of paradise in return for some new knowledge, I can’t help thinking of my own incremental sense of impending banishment with each new rumor overheard, as a child, from across the border of Adulthood.
- | 6
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Reviews

The Truth About ‘The Truth About Marie’

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There’s a lesson in this that might be too awful for us to want to learn, which is that death takes from us not just our lives, but also our right to insist upon a particular version of those lives.
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Curiosities

Not Foster Wallace

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Essays

Bad Bookshops: An Appreciation

- | 12
As great as it is to be able to choose whatever you want on Amazon, sometimes what you really want is to have no choice at all.
- | 12
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Reviews

Weird, Wild West: Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers

- | 6
The territory he takes us through is bleak and nightmarish, teeming with malice and greed, with violent lusts and blank antipathies.
- | 6
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Curiosities

Appearing Elsewhere

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Staff Picks

Staff Pick: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

- | 2
By the end of the first page, you have learned everything you are ever going to know about the events on which the book focuses. What Queneau does do, however, is re-narrate this same scenario a further 98 times, in a series of distinct styles.
- | 2
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Curiosities

Appearing Elsewhere

- | 1
The Millions Interview

It’s All For Keeps: David Vann on Truth, Fiction, and How We Find Out Who We Are

- | 4
I do have the same sense about my real life that I have about my fiction, which is that I make all these decisions but I have no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing. That life is essentially shaped by the unconscious in the same way that fiction is.
- | 4
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Books as Objects Notable Articles The Future of the Book

The E-Reader of Sand: The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover

- | 61
It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it.
- | 61
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Essays Prizes

Why Do We Care About Literary Awards?

- | 16
Getting worked up about the fact that really interesting, innovative fiction so often gets ignored by awards judges is, when you think about it, a little bit absurd.
- | 16
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Reviews

Edouard Levé’s ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levé’s Suicide

- | 6
To write a book about a suicide, to call it Suicide, and to then take your own life before its publication is, whatever else it is, a way of exerting an overpowering influence over how that work is received.
- | 6
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In Person

Working on John Banville: My Awkward Relationship with My Subject

- | 15
I had also convinced myself that it amused me to be utterly unknown to Banville, and yet to be spending my working days doing nothing but thinking about his novels. But I’m not sure it really did amuse me. I think it felt a little indecorous; even, perhaps, a little shameful. I sometimes joked about feeling a bit like a stalker, but I wasn’t always entirely sure that I was joking.
- | 15
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Essays

On Not Going Out of the House: Thoughts About Plotlessness

- | 14
If life keeps "flowing, always flowing, smashing everything" as it rushes toward the ocean of death, the desire to scramble for the bank and sit the whole thing out on dry land is understandable.
- | 14
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