The original working title of Looking for Trouble was Dad Behavior

A new Thomas Pynchon in 2025—I’ll admit, the sophomore gags always got on my nerves, and we were never big potheads back in the 80s, but: the man has always had a real knack for timing. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427...

Brodernism—stupid word. But there’s always been something embarrassing about the way critics fawn over these doorstoppers. That said, without all the far-flung world lit in translation the culture would be in a sorry state. lareviewofbooks.org/article/agai...

This is a classic TV trope, isn’t it?

They really should launch an editorial wing. They have the money to pay writers, and who wouldn’t want the exposure?

“Mean girls only ever get away with such a stunt while they’re hot. Like any fad, it doesn’t last forever.” Finally someone hits those two where they live.

The concept of the it girl is baffling. What is it. A girl who does drugs? We used to just call them girls.

Is this what passes for decadent these days? People having sex with each other? People using drugs? www.thecut.com/article/publ...

Have thought about it plenty and I’m fairly certain the ultimate nightmare joint rotation (the word “blunt” was never in our drug vocabulary) would have to be Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

Shame the shooter never followed through with Infinite Jest. Wallace is usually a reliable gateway drug to the ultimate literary chronicle of Gen X manhood: Looking for Trouble, by yours truly.

Every day someone else is saying this. But who are these guys, really? Not the writers, the red-pilled dolts. Has anyone sat down with any of them? What are they actually like? www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

Foster Wallace and Steely Dan—two flavors that do NOT go together.

Up until about ten years ago you would be “on the phone.” Now you’re “on a call.” Ridiculous.

There are some good questions here, if I might not answer them all the same way. Regardless it’s worth the read for the savvy debunking from Kenner and the perfect dismissal of Barney as “high on his own supply.”

This is the only reason I read books.

This could actually be useful. Fewer bad manuscripts clogging up the slush pile at real publishers and agencies.

This kid’s nothing but a wannabe so far, but—there’s no denying this kind of up-your-own-ass insouciance is what many great novelists are made of slate.com/culture/2024...

What is this supposed to mean, exactly?

All authors are narcissists, but it takes a special kind of narcissist to use literature—and your family—to build your own commercial empire www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/ar...

Two marquee male names in American fiction tarnished in one week… will I be next?!

One reviewer grumbled about the parentheses—(but we know that it’s inside the parenthesis that reality happens).

If we’re going to go down this road… what do we think the odds are that, say, Faulkner also had a teenage mistress no one knew about? Joyce? Dickens?

Here, for example—not only is it hard to tell where the reality ends and where the fantasy begins, it’s not even clear whose fantasy this is.

This is plenty entertaining—but I’m not sure yet whether the woman Vincenzo Barney (an Italian dinosaur, I’m guessing) is profiling is Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse or Barney’s www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

kathy acker, ‘great expectations’

An exquisite irony: the incel king conquers the virgin kingdom, only to see his subjects flee and finally sow their oats in their adopted homeland.

It is honestly a sign of progress that no feminist has written a “Stop kink shaming Matt Gaetz” piece.

I won’t deny that Kissick is on to something about the cynicism of the art-market’s political bent—but the “transgression” he longs for, the “deranged” character of the art world of a decade or so ago… that could get pretty damn boring too harpers.org/archive/2024...

Maybe. But is it not also, occasionally, the only way to realistically assess and thus, the only way to move forward?

This whole crisis of masculinity thing—used to be Mailer would spin his wheels in Harper’s and we’d all have a good laugh. Sad to see it’s gotten so dour.

This is quite a piece—Sophie Kemp is good. But I’m also troubled by the notion that this Bronze Age conception of masculinity is the only one young men will actually find seductive. lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-...