Clarice Lispector’s Cosmology July 29, 2024
Like dangerous talismans, Clarice Lispector’s novels stage unholy communions—between human and cockroach, reason and madness—that plunge readers further and further into “the incommunicable kingdoms of spirit.” Born in Ukraine, but forced to flee wit...
The Other Side of Silence April 26, 2024
In the first half of the twentieth century, literature, like philosophy, experienced a breakdown in its trust of language. This signaled, among other things, a breakdown in the relationship between the word and the world—in the power of language to s...
On Clarice Lispector’s 'The Apple in the Dark' March 22, 2024
Clarice Lispector called Washington a “vague and inorganic city.” Perhaps the contrived glory of America’s capital—with its clean, alphabet labeled streets, towering, marble-white obelisk, and mismatched neoclassical and modern government buildings—j...
Sebald and His Precursors March 01, 2024
Lerner, Cusk, Greenwell, Hemon, Cole, Dyer, Self, Sinclair, Craig, Hamburger . . . The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium. This a...