Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. -The Counterlife In an article in the New York Times published shortly…
Archive for April, 2019
Philip Roth’s Modest Phase
In the 1950s, when Philip Roth came of age and first began to publish, it was the fate of the writer to have to consider the fate of the individual,…
Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint
A month ago, I was on the phone with a librarian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, inquiring about the papers of Philip Roth. Would I need…
Introduction: Roth’s Yahrzeit
Philip Roth’s death, last May, at the age of 85, shouldn’t have come as a surprise — after all, he was very old! — but it did. His last novel,…
Horror and the Arts of Feminist Assembly
We live in an era of what Lauren Berlant has called “genre flail.” Amid the floods, famine, and fire of accelerating climate disaster, worsening refugee crises, unbounded global war, mass…
True Detective and Climatic Horror
In the first season of True Detective (2014), two white male representatives of Louisiana’s Criminal Investigation Division are shown tracking down a potential serial killer. The killer, or killers, leaves…
“Ain’t It Funny”: Danny Brown and Detroit Horror
In 2013, Danny Brown sparked a minor hip-hop beef when he said about fellow Detroit rapper Big Sean: “You listen to how I talk about Detroit, and you listen to…
The Enslaved Child and the Carceral Child
In 2019, black children are still denied consideration as children. Anti-black violence has never spared and continues not to spare children. Children are neither symbolic exceptions nor accidental casualties but…
Global Horror: An Introduction
When I imagine contemporary art outside the constraints of the nation the first thing I notice is horror. An Anglophone Caribbeanist by training, my work has long focused on texts…