Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear: A Book That Simulates Simulacra
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is a simulation of a simulacrum that collapses under the weight of its affected petticoats. Its protagonist wants, by her own admission, “all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity"—which is to say she wants history as a pure article of consumption. Then the book performs its nasty little miracle: it drops the woman who has been simulating a fake past into wha
May 42 min read
Lena Dunham’s Famesick: Four Shocking Revelations
Find out why we're calling Lena Dunham's Famesick "the best memoir of the decade."
Apr 301 min read
The Only Thinkpiece About Lindy West's Adult Braces That Matters
So here, in the cracked electric theater of American confession, comes Lindy West hauling her soul into the town square, and the crowd, drunk on its own righteousness, mistakes gawking for judgment and judgment for wisdom. They chatter about desire, humiliation, power, arrangement, consent—as though the modern marriage weren't already a madhouse with lesser upholstery.
Apr 151 min read
Nelio Biedermann's Lázár: Is this 22-Year Old the Next Thomas Mann?
Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old Swiss wunderkind whose debut novel, Lázár, was just released in English, has been compared to every author under the sun, from Márquez to Mann. Does his output really measure up, or are Biedermann's publicists just banking on American readers not knowing who Thomas Mann is?
Apr 141 min read
Helen DeWitt Rejects Modernity, Windham-Campbell Prize
Helen DeWitt’s decision to avoid the trappings of modernity that come with being a literary grantee have cost her the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize. The upside? No irritating Zoom calls, podcasts, or social posts—the shunned DeWitt gets to focus writing. The downside? None.
Apr 121 min read
Enter the William H. Gass Extended Universe: Dalkey Archive Press and the Forking of The Tunnel
There is something splendidly deranged in watching a small indie press marshal the full battery of slop-cannons—Twitter astroturfing, merch drops, the whole hypersaturated liturgy of suspect UGC—as if the reissue of an obscure thirty-year-old novel were the next phase of the Marvel Extended Universe.
Apr 111 min read
Resurrecting the Novel: An Anti-Review of Ben Lerner's Transcription
Ben Lerner has done something almost impossible in Transcription: he has made the novel dangerous again, restored both as argument and apparition, memory and fraud, broken machine and user error.
Apr 71 min read
