Archive for category: Books

Fiction fact-check    (2021.10.25)

Just how many contemporary novels even deign to admit that email, TV, and bathrooms exist?

This just in: Publishing still moribund    (2021.06.20)

Helen Andrews’ Boomers shows the futility of the publishing oligopoly, which takes most of your money and still lets you get obvious facts wrong. But the alternate option – self-publishing without expert help – is also doomed to failure

Book(s) of the year 2020    (2020.12.22)

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

Books of the year 2019    (2019.12.31)

Including three that permanently reset my mindset (term used advisedly)

Novels: passé    (2019.05.13)

Someday you’re gonna die. Imagine having spent your life reading literature and novels

‘Saving Beauty’    (2019.05.11)

Saving Beauty by Han Byung-Chul surprised the shit out of me with the most arresting opening pages I have read in 30 years. Smooth “embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like. The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed”

Books of the year    (2018.12.31)

Provocations by Camille Paglia and The Gift by Lewis Hyde

“There’s language, then there’s blood”    (2018.05.25)

David Shields, Other People: “I once felt joy in being alive and I felt this mainly when I was playing basketball and I rarely if ever feel that joy anymore and it’s my own damn fault and that’s life”

Books of the year 2017    (2017.12.29)

Billy Hayes’ Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me; Douglas Thomas’ Never Use Futura