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The Red Arrow by William Brewer |
L.A. Times

In his provocative 1991 book Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, Leonard Shlain notes that although his subjects make for “a strange coupling,” fundamentally they “are both investigations into the nature of reality.” William Brewer’s debut novel, The Red Arrow, adds another pairing to his matrix: depression and psychedelics.

The premise of The Red Arrow sounds like the high-concept picaresque narratives of Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson: A debt-ridden painter-turned-writer accepts a job as a ghostwriter for a world-renowned physicist who vanishes before the writer can finish the book. Desperate to escape his debts and plagued by a suicidal depression he refers to as “the Mist,” the unnamed writer undergoes a treatment of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Most of this information is provided to the reader in the first few pages. We meet the narrator as he’s on his way to find the Physicist (name redacted per their contract) aboard Italy’s Frecciarossa (“Red Arrow”) train. Along the way, the writer describes his financial failures, his strained relationship with his wife, Annie, and his life-changing new treatment. Continue reading…

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Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology,
edited by Wendy and Tyler Chin-Tanner | Tasteful Rude

In 1976, five Black women sued General Motors because the company systemically prevented their advancement. The court, however, ruled in favor of GM because, as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw put it, “General Motors did hire women—albeit white women—during the period that no Black women were hired [and thus] there was, in the court’s view, no sex discrimination that the seniority system could conceivably have perpetuated.” The court then recommended that the case be consolidated with another race discrimination lawsuit against GM. A person, in other words, could sue for race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both, because claiming that there was a specific prejudice against Black women, in the court’s words, “clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”

Crenshaw uses this case—and others—in her seminal paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” published in University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” because “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis.” A feminism that only addresses the experiences of white women is no true feminism, and an antiracist politic that only addresses Black men is similarly incomplete, as neither on their own addresses the experience and oppression of Black women. Though “intersectionality” has been expanded to include all manner of categorical intersections—including class, sexuality, gender identity, nationality, disability, and age—it began as a legal concept specifically referencing Black women. Continue reading…

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97803165602211Big Bang by David Bowman | Publishers Weekly

“Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?” asks Bowman (1957–2012) in the opening of his big, bold, and brilliant posthumous novel, and for the next 600 pages, he investigates what occurred in the years leading up to that monumental event in American history. Through the lives of such iconic figures as Norman Mailer, Elvis, William de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Spock, Ngô Dihn Diem, the Kennedys themselves, and dozens of others, Bowman conjures an enormous narrative out of the troubled years from 1950 to 1963. Continue reading…

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PrintAt Home in Ruins: Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke | Fiction Advocate

Kristen Radtke’s meditative graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This ruminates on ruin and decay—of an abandoned city, of a genetically faulty heart, of love and relationships, and, in the long run, of all things. Through black-and-white images with stark juxtapositions, Radtke braids together the death of her favorite uncle, Dan, the end of her engagement to her college boyfriend, her travels to various ruins around the world, and her own struggle to find a home somewhere that isn’t in the process of deteriorating. Continue reading…

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labyrinth-wallBorges is Still Dead. (Or is He? And Which Borges?) 
Literary Hub

On the 30th Anniversary of Borges’s death. Maybe my favorite essay I’ve published yet.

“The Other” and “August 25, 1983” are twin stories sharing a mirror: a young man fears the unknown future, while an old man accepts the unchangeable past. (In fact many have dismissed Borges’s later work as “geriatrica” too full of nostalgia.) But as I read Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions, his essays and reviews I considered taking him at his word: 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 fantastical events with straight-faced authority, using the syntax and tone of academia; and then there is this other Borges, the critic, who writes reasonably and clearly, companionably and insightfully, about high-brow and esoteric subjects, whose aim is elucidation rather than bewilderment. As I moved through each review and essay of Selected Non-Fictions, I felt a similar shock that the young Borges did upon seeing his own name on the register: this couldn’t possibly be the same Borges, could it?

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Theatre-Critics-copyActually, Criticism is Literature | Literary Hub

Now as a critic I love these essays; I get a kick out of seeing how others define what it is that I do. Moreover, many of these writers have brought brilliant insights into what can often be a dismissed vocation. But while I appreciate the efforts of my fellow critics, there is one aspect to nearly all of these defenses that I disagree with, deeply, and that is the implication that criticism is separate from the literature it describes, as if novelists, poets, playwrights, and nonfiction writers were the players in the game and we critics merely the referees. What’s intimated in many defenses of criticism is this gap between observer and observed, between artist and non-artist.

This is bullshit. Criticism is also literature. Now, by that I do not mean that criticism is both outside and inside of literature. No, no, no. The word “also” there insists on criticism’s inclusion as a genre of literature, and not as a subject that stands outside of it.

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932b7fa05Here Be Dragons: On Literary Cartography | LA Review of Books
An essay-review of Andrew DeGraff’s beautiful and witty book of literary maps Plotted: A Literary Atlas for LA Review of Books: “For Plutarch, fiction was what was off the map, a land beyond the reach of historians with their “credit” and “certainty,” where the only “inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables.” But, as DeGraff and others have shown, we can’t help charting that space, too, however imperfectly. Here’s another way to put it: maps describe places where people have already been in order to show others how to get there. Fiction is made of maps to places no one has ever seen, and when we all arrive at our destinations, none of us end up in the same place.”

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fsg4_nowhereHappy Birthday, Gary Larson! | Literary Hub
For exactly 15 years—from January 1, 1980 to January 1, 1995—Gary Larson wrote and drew The Far Side, a comic strip so funny and daring and biting that it cleared the path for the likes of Matt Groening and Trey Parker in the 1990s. Larson’s humor relished irony, hypocrisy and stupidity, and his view of humanity was, ultimately, a bleak one. He was one of my heroes growing up. Here’s to you, Gary, on your 65th birthday!