Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman, and the Horror of False Freedom
The real tragedy is believing yourself free when freedom is impossible.
Lev Grossman’s Neoliberal Hell on Earth: The True Terror Behind The Magicians
Imagine if Pod Save America ran a magic school.
An Unintended Critique of Manifest Destiny in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness
On dismal failure and death drives.
Claire Keegan and the Value of Waiting a Long Time for Something Short
What we lose when we value production over precision.
Forget Edgar Allen Poe, What About Wilkie Collins? A Tribute to the Forgotten Father of the Detective Novel
With 27 novels, more than 50 short stories and 15 plays, it’s time that Collins started to get the credit he deserved.
Ritual & Responsibility: Subversion in The Wasp Factory and We Have Always Lived in the Castle
There is nothing so commanding, right, or natural in the powers that be that a child cannot toss them aside.
All That is Solid Melts Into Air: A Review of Stories are Weapons
Several significant flaws prevent this book from being a useful treatise on the American culture wars.
The Death of The F*ck: Neopuritanism and Commercial Fiction
How readers with presumably progressive politics are increasingly aligning with the far right on the moralization of sex.
Michel Houellebecq and the Birth of the Incel
“The idea gradually dawned on me that all these people – men or women – were not in the least deranged; they were simply lacking in love.”