A newspaper obituary, like an instamatic camera and perhaps the future perfect tense, is one of many mediums or documents that intersects with adulthood and which is collectively responsible for…
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Contemporaries Essays, Tan Lin
Contemporaries Essays, Tan Lin
Introduction: Tan Lin
For a writer so often associated with an aesthetics of boredom, Tan Lin has been a source of unusual excitement in experimental literature for the last three decades.1 Perhaps this…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
Palestine/Israel and the Dynamics of Suspicion
*Note: I conceived of this article and wrote much of it prior to October 7th, 2023. It’s reasonable to contend that cultural repression is not the most urgent matter in…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
The Family Plot: Suspicion, Conspiracy, and the “Shadow Pandemic”
In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns began for the foreseeable future, it felt quite obvious that, among a myriad of emergent crises, domestic abuse was suddenly surging. It was…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
Real Women
Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then? —Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil “Are you really being truthful, Grandmamma? Really and truly truthful?” —Roald Dahl, The…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
Looking at the “Infra” of Infrastructure
Suspicion circulates freely throughout Lydia Millet’s fiction. In the middle of her 2011 environmental-quasi-detective-novel Ghost Lights, the narrator explains that Hal, the protagonist, was “finding it hard to relinquish his…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
Suspicion, As Seen on TV
On August 23, 2000, in the finale of the first season of Survivor, as over 51 million people1 watched, Wisconsin truck driver Sue Hawk cemented herself in reality television history…
Contemporaries Essays, Suspicion
Introduction
The other day I watched the neo-noir movie Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987) starring Robert De Niro as a character named Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke as a hard-living…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
“A list that reflects the world”: An Interview with Peter Blackstock
Peter Blackstock has made a reputation for being the only one to say yes. He acquired Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer after 13 other publishers rejected it. The novel went on to win…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
“Escríbelo como si me lo estuvieras contando”: How a Mojado Writes a Cross-Border, Cross-Linguistic Narrative
The words in my title — Escríbelo como si me lo estuvieras contando (“write it as if you were telling it to me”) — were spoken by Dick Reavis, a white…