Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head….
Peer Reviewed Articles
Norman Mailer and “The Mary McCarthy Case” Revisited
The runaway success of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about the lives of eight Vassar graduates during the 1930s, was one of the most sensational literary events of 1963….
Writers for Goldwater
In Political Fictions (2001), Joan Didion insists that her politics are not “eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable.” She writes: They are the logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative…
Photographic Futures
The first illustration in Lydia Millet’s novel Mermaids in Paradise (2015) depicts the back of a man’s head as he gazes down at his laptop. What could be more representative of…
Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital
Jeff Bezos begged to appear on Star Trek Beyond. Sergey Brin drew inspiration from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Elon Musk loves video games and cites Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, and…
Queer Times for the Straight Book: Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres
If you read a lot of Michel Serres – and you might: he’s written many books, about a lot of things – a conundrum emerges. On the one hand, he…
Global China as Genre
Sunny Xiang
Sean Bonney’s Hate Poems
We are [. . .] unalterable rebels, without gods, master or fatherland; irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or material, individual or collective, in other words, of law and dictatorship…
Introduction: How to Be Now
“What’s happening with the special issue? The ‘now’ of its title keeps changing its referent!” So one of our contributors complained in June, after we had predicted an April publication…
Fuck the Avant-Garde
Rachel Greenwald Smith