literary
All the Books I Read in 2013
The literature world was weird this year. I almost don’t remember it. It was rapid, and overflowing with so many new presses and faces and legs that it was hard to know where to look and who or what didn’t suck.
Portrait of the Marquis de Sade as a Young Female Hacker
Trisha Low's The Compleat Purge is an honest record of what it feels like to grow up during the internet age.
Books I Gave Up on Reading
I have a hard time letting myself stop reading a book once I’ve started. I always have faith that even though something starts off difficult or boring or bad it can suddenly shift gears, making insane sense out of what had before just seemed tedious as...
'La Sexualité,' by Rob Delaney
Rob Delaney, he of the funny tweets and sometime writer of VICE articles, is releasing his first book tomorrow. The book is called Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. and it is one of the most...
Implausible Literary Halloween Costumes No One Will Recognize
The Judge from Blood Meridian: One cool thing to do on Halloween is to act like a total dick to everybody and pretend it’s just part of your costume. Considering that the Judge is one of the biggest loudmouth brutes in all of literature, why not...
Learning How to Haunt Yourself
The more computers infiltrate our lives, the more fucked and torn apart people become. Where dicks like Whitman went off and lived surrounded with the trees, now we disappear into web browsers. Amina Cain, however, is able to turn the modern condition...
The Many False Floors of Harry Mathews
Since 1962, Harry Mathews has published more than 30 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, many of which blur the lines between the three so effectively it’s difficult to say which genre they fall into.
Everyone Is a Plagiarist
In the face of all the recent discussion about plagiarism, I’ve been constantly thinking about inspiration, where anything comes from. It’s hard not to feel constantly affected by everything that surrounds us. After driving through Atlanta traffic, for...
Skaters Can Read
Despite the age-old rumor that skateboarders are illiterate, we have indisputable photographic and videotape evidence that proves just the opposite.
Lola
Photos inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Lolita. Photography by Tomás Peña, styling by Ella Cepeda.
Burning Bodies and Playing Dead with Jeff Jackson
An Excerpt from Jeff Jackson's New Novel, 'Mira Corpora'
We Await Silent Thomas's Empire
Pynchon’s newest novel, The Bleeding Edge, comes out next week. Penguin released a teaser, which I skeptically read up to the point, a few paragraphs in, where a boy named Ziggy tells his mom that a tree "doesn't suck."