Repeat a word enough and it starts to sound so weird that sense dissolves into questions about language itself. Take the word “life”: Why are we asking and answering what kind of life Brett Kavanaugh has lived? It makes sense that friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and victims would all rise up, now, and demand to be heard, and that we would hear them: as a lifetime member of the Supreme Court, this man’s judgments will yield to no higher law than those of his colleagues, for as long as life remains in his body. Life is the key thing here, both as the thing his “lifetime” appointment is attached to and the story one can tell about what that thing is and what makes him worthy of this honor. When his defenders protest that his life is being “ruined”—when Kellyanne Conway… Read More...

A Redacted Archive R is for Rhodes, as in (cecil john) Rhodes, who (still) has a university in South Africa named after him. R is for Reputation, as in “it cannot be disputed that Rhodes University has, over its 113-year history developed and sustained an enviable reputation for academic and research excellence. R is for rape as in rape culture. When you’re a student in what has been un/fondly dubbed the purple bubble, these three Rs collate into a particular shared—and often redacted—Reality. It is precisely because this Reality is so familiar that you want to wash it off, to scrape it off your skin if you have to. It’s been there so long. It’s this Reality that necessitated the #Chapter2.12 poster campaign on campus. It’s this Reality that made campus security pull them down. It’s this Reality that published… Read More...

More has changed since the original Blade Runner than the replicants. In 1982, the future was still in the stars. The movie only alluded to it, but Ridley Scott’s ever-raining Los Angeles was where the left-behind relics of humanity still squatted, decadent and sullen; “the more prosperous, clean cut types” as Pauline Kael put it, “have gone off-world to some Scarsdale in space.” In other words, the dystopia we saw on the screen was not The Future; it was a rust belt where the future had come and gone, and would never come again. There are no more "attack ships" or "c-beams" on Earth, you see; it is only on the off-world colonies that you could still see things, still do things. But while Kael was right about LA being left behind, it wasn’t “Scarsdale” where the rest of humanity… Read More...

Rodrigo Hasbún’s Affections is a very short novel, the story of an ex-Nazi and his family trying to lose themselves in Bolivia. But because it repeatedly refuses to become the book you expect it to be—and because it lives in this moment of refusal, and never stops being a novel that refuses to be the novel you think it will be—that brevity makes it a lot easier to give it the re-reading that it both needs and deserves. I say that, because this is a novel that doesn’t end when it finishes: I started re-reading the early sections before I’d even finished the novel, and I strongly recommend this way of approaching its twelve interconnected vignettes. The novel’s short chapters feel more like paintings than prose: rather than read them end-to-end as a singular interconnected narrative, you watch them like… Read More...

If you read the reviews—like this one, this one, or this one—you’ll see Danzy Senna’s new novel New People described as a “social satire” or a “comic novel”—albeit, perhaps, a “darkly comic” novel—and verbs like “lampoon” and “parody” will be used to punctuate the point. What we are reading is funny, a “comedy of manners.” The reading makes sense, and these are good reviews: Senna has often framed her work as a rejection of the sentimental “tragic mulatto” genre—in which the curse of being mixed race is the inevitable bad end that follows—and wouldn’t a novel that rejects tragedy, naturally, be comedy? Indeed, if the “tragic mulatto” is a person out of time, out of place, and out of race—a person who, being neither black nor white, can never be integrated into a society built on the schism between—then the first thing… Read More...

Though they were published in English out of order, the sequence of three novels that Yuri Herrera has sometimes called his “border trilogy” adds depth and complexity as it goes along. Signs Preceding the End of the World—his second-written, but first-translated—is a masterpiece, a journey into the underworld that is also a voyage of rebirth, noir fiction that’s also cosmological millenarianism, excavating the Mexica afterlife. The Transmigration of Bodies—his third written, second-translated—concerns the flows and circulations of social life and death, and the work done by bodies to keep the streams going (as well as the work done to bury them when they stop). You could say that in both novels, he is fascinated by death, but that just lifts the lid of how he turns noir conventions into something much richer and more ancient-feeling; because his work lives in… Read More...

Rather than asking why the New York Times—the paper of record, a bastion of free inquiry, and champion of the fact-based community—would employ Bret Stephens, a troll whose relationship to facts is that of a kitty to its litter, it might be better to ask: why does a newspaper employ opinion columnists at all? What has “journalism,” with its scrupulous attention to accuracy, verifiability, and the checking of facts, to do with “opinion” writers whose apparent lifetime tenure rests on representing an ideology? Put it that way, after all, and you are describing a very surprising schism at the heart of the thing we might otherwise call a “newspaper.” On the one hand, a newspaper is where people write only what can be verified, facts that are known as such because they can be checked. If a fact is found… Read More...

Ostensibly set in the present day, Daniel Espinosa’s Life didn’t, at first, feel much like any “present day” that I recognize. Before the main events of the movie begin—before it becomes an Alien-style monster-on-the-space-station movie—we see a basically united and well-balanced humanity, exemplified by a happy family of American, British, Russian, and Chinese astronauts, male and female. As the crew advances boldly into the unknown, struggling to bring to life a long dormant fragment of a Martian life-form, we see an earth apparently populated by dreamers and idealists who follow along with the wonder and awe of a child dreaming of the stars. It’s what Star Trek occasionally fashioned itself as being, minus all the magic technology and military hierarchy, the best of humanity: social, empathic, curious. It’s mostly gestural, of course; there are no info-dumps to tell us that… Read More...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBZvl7dIu4 The right-wing backlash against this Budweiser commercial is the best praise you can give it, like when Fox News described “No Fascist US” as “anti-Trump graffiti.” The ad is a ludicrous load of ideology, but if it makes Trumpsters angry, then, frankly, it has already exhausted the revolutionary potential of a Super Bowl beer commercial. That Budweiser has denied any political intent (“There's really no correlation with anything else that's happening in the country”) is the icing on the cake; it’s corporate PR, but it’s also, accidentally, a hilarious bit of gaslighting, droll trollery. “Correlation” is a carefully chosen word, a synonym for “not causation.” But context is not optional and there is no such thing as coincidence in film. As any good communist film theorist knows, the true kernel of film is the cut—the place where the decision… Read More...

When Raphael Lemkin first coined the term “genocide,” it was a word for what he was against. But the direct, programmatic, and industrial murder of an ethnic group—as has come to be exemplified by the Holocaust’s trains, gas chambers, and crematoriums—was not the only, or even the primary meaning of the term; it was not the only thing he was against. Today, for better or for worse, most people understand a genocide to be mass killing, organized and state-sponsored, with the Holocaust the original for all the other holocausts which must Never Again. Genocide is mass-killing, full stop. But Lemkin had begun thinking about legal protections for sub-national groups well before the second world war—starting with the Armenian genocide—and the crime to which he would eventually give a name was something more broad and expansive: any systematic and organized destruction… Read More...

Doing the impossible in the Anthropocene: Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh. Katya, an ethical pest removal specialist, has an impossible job. Rich people hire her to remove pests from their homes, as they once hired her father, Len, a more conventional (and less subtle) exterminator. But Katya has introduced a wrinkle into the family business: she extracts the range of “unloved and unlovely” creatures that hide and survive in the nooks and crannies—the “caterpillars, snakes, frogs, slugs, cockroaches, baboons, rats, mice, snails, pigeons, ticks, geckos, flies, fleas, cockroaches, bats, and spiders,” as she enumerates for a client—but she does it without actually killing them. She moves them and dumps them in parks or in the wilderness outside the city limits; she coaxes them out of wherever they are, and transports them to new hiding places, as gently and humanely as she can. She… Read More...

But you already knew that. Thanksgiving might be the most intuitive holiday, the least strange, the least alienating. A non-ecumenical holiday, all are welcome; though it isn’t not religious, there is no religious content to disagree with, or be excluded by; if Thanksgiving were to intersect with another holiday—say, a Jewish Holiday like Hanukkah—it will consume it, gladly, absorbing potato pancakes into its bloodstream as easily as it absorbs everything else. There is really not any ritual content at all to Thanksgiving, in fact, which is precisely what makes it so unstoppable: you eat turkey (or don’t), but not for any particular reason. You can watch the football if you want, but not doing so wouldn’t even signify as a lack; there are parades, but there don’t have to be. There’s a story about the first Thanksgiving, which most people… Read More...

Forget the story. What animates Bae Suah’s A Greater Music is the question of whether there are greater (and lesser) forms of art. Or perhaps “question” is the wrong word; perhaps “compulsion.” Perhaps “need,” or “hope,” or “memory.” Perhaps love. Perhaps grief. Perhaps what animates this little novel is the question of the capital letter in Art and how Love might mean more than a word, beyond sentiments; how a greater music might index the presence of a soul beyond death, an art beyond life, or a Love that can survive the ending of a love affair. It’s a novel about the persistence of something in the meaningless void, the faith that there might be something, and also the loneliness of living in the uncertainty. Or maybe it’s just a tone poem set to language, a dream of the lovely,… Read More...

The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei (translated by Canaan Morse) begins and ends in the same place: a humble audio technician named Cui building a sound system for rich people. It’s a short novel about China today, about the two decades of feverish economic growth that have transformed Beijing since the 1990’s. In the dwindling of our protagonist’s craft and fortunes, amidst the explosion of new wealth and new values that have made the New China whatever it is, there is a story about the downfall of labor: betrayed by family, by friends, and by his business, our protagonist Cui finally makes a tiny play for a modestly large score, with very mixed results. But despite the tragi-comic plot that would seem to move the novel forward—taking a character defined by his stuck-ness and placing him in motion—the fact that… Read More...

Elena Ferrante’s work is oceanic, and this is a stone thrown in it. This is important to remember, because ripples are splashy but fade away. The reporter—and four newspapers, in four languages—that devoted "a months-long investigation" to doxing Elena Ferrante have done so because they think she is small and that they can diminish and comprehend her by asserting her real name and history. This is what makes it a violation, and a desecration. But this is also what makes them wrong, why it’s important to hold on to her story of herself, and to treat theirs with the contempt it deserves. They want to make her small, by making her a real person with a real history and real name and real background. They want to assert control over that person, and what it represents, by revealing it. But Elena Ferrante isn’t small because… Read More...

"African fiction" contemporary -NYC *** What Tope Folarin has been missing from “much of the African fiction [he's] been reading of late” is: “This restlessness, this stopping and starting and landing on something new, then moving past the new to something almost incomprehensible but not quite, this initial inaccessibility that coalesces into something almost transcendent.” It’s a lovely sentence. I’m not completely sure what it means, and that might be why he uses the work of an installation artist as a figure for what he wants from African fiction. The barrier to be cleared—between one media and another, between things known and strange—is the point of the metaphor, and in an essay “against accessibility,” he wants an “initial inaccessibility” in the work itself. He wants fiction that breaks through, and goes somewhere new. In his judgement, today, “much” of it doesn’t.… Read More...