Literature

One evening, in the horizontal light, soft and colourful, with an acute sense of my depravity, having just published a piece with the phrase ‘satyric schlong’ alongside observations from a nudist bathhouse in Sweden, I sought refuge in the pages of Kafka’s diaries, that ‘twenty-first century Dante.’

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more

Houellebecq wore his biography, professional identity, marital status, and psychiatric condition – everything modern society considers intrinsic and defining of the individual – as an amusing costume to be played with and discarded. He frees himself through his work from the straitjacket of ‘identity politics’ which placates its prisoners, like a... See more

“The writing of the pose is the literary product of the MFA system and of Instagram in equal measure—it brings writing into the ordinary grueling business of the curation of the self which dominates advanced capitalist culture today.”

A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the... See more

Literary texts tend to distort the linearity of narrative sequence, and to reproduce the coexistence and simultaneity of interiorized events that resist conventional linear chronology. The narrative thread unravels freely between past and present, between different temporal planes, combining high and low registers, erudite literary references,... See more