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Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’
Photograph by Cormac Scully. Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies—recently longlisted for the Booker Prize—is more than six hundred pages long and tackles subjects ranging from string theory to...
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Life Outside of Academia; Ghost Stories
Who are the great American writers of today who do not hold teaching positions or B.A.s or M.F.A.s in literature? It is very frustrating to read that so and so teaches at this or that university, or...
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Unread Books; Changing Character Names
I’ve never read Moby-Dick or War and Peace, but people think I have, because I told them so. What is the great book you have never—but should have—read? Just this morning—at five o’clock, to be exact—I...
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Mistaken Identity
William Gaddis, self-portrait. On March 29, 1962, the Village Voice ran a full-page ad touting the merits of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions—a book which had been published a good seven years before....
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Planned Obsolescence
An ad from the Philips company archives. Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in...
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When Art Got Expensive, and Other News
Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja (detail), 1650. Finally available, after forty-one years: Gravity’s Rainbow, the audiobook. It comprises thirty CDs and is performed by a superhumanly...
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Headshrinker
Steve DiBenedetto, Reverse Epiphany, 2015, oil on linen, 20″ x 18″. If Thomas Pynchon writes systems novels, Steve DiBenedetto makes systems paintings—paranoid, erratic, vaguely interconnected. His...
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Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News
Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack...
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The Dharma Girls
Still from the 2012 film adaptation of On the Road. Dad gave me a copy of On the Road for Christmas when I was sixteen. At thirteen, it had been The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, then The...
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