Conglomeration only seems to be accelerating . . . we need to understand how it impacts what we read and how we read it ..read more

Through the ventriloquist act of fiction, I could finally admit to the parts of myself and my situation that I was too nervous or scared or ashamed to see ..read more

Unlike with a fat crime novel, where plot is king and words are more like soldiers going off to battle in wave after wave, these words are precisely chosen to maximize the spareness of the prose ..read more

[Kearse's hero] has been hurt by the carefully constructed cruelty of capitalism and doesn’t so much want to lift the veil but set it ablaze ..read more

Our complicity in capitalist transactions does not have to prevent us from learning together . . . If we acknowledge the reality of students as consumers of a (usually exorbitantly priced) liberal arts education, we can better understand how they are interacting with us . . . with one another, and with the administration. We can let go of the increasingly stale idea that the classroom or campus is ever a pristinely objective or neutral space ..read more

The drama of recent Syrian history—the reign of the dictatorial Assad family, the brutal civil war begun in 2011—plays out in the struggle of one single consciousness trapped in its gears ..read more

Jews across the diaspora . . . have been vocally demanding a ceasefire and organizing to take action. They are part of the long Jewish tradition of criticizing Israel and Zionism, which has existed as long as the idea of Israel ..read more

Lane seems to be claiming that there’s something fatally false about the industrial landscape, which appears natural but in fact is inimical to life. He warns, too, against worshipping machines that comfort us even as they kill ..read more

I don’t think of transness as this ontological curse, but I remember thinking that way. Part of writing the novel was trying to undo that thinking, even as I represent it ..read more

You don’t have to know anything about hockey to feel that Wendt does: they write it gorgeously, in prose thrumming with the rhythm of coordinated movement ..read more