Our books, movies, and television shows are arguably bleaker than ever. What's behind the encroaching, thickening darkness?
Lost Library
In Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, everything happens so much. What about those books where nothing happens, and it's fine?
David Foster Wallace's big concerns live on in the interviews of Jaden and Willow Smith.
Serial has 1.26 million listeners hungry for clues that might only add up to chaos: like W.G. Sebald or Toronto writer Martha Baillie, it plays on our impulse to make sense of it all.
Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, like Christopher Nolan's Memento, is about the selection of memory; perhaps we're much worse than we recall.
César Aira writes practically off the cuff, creating narrative puzzles for the fun of solving them. Should his readers feel tricked?
Pere Ubu's new album taps into an old fantasy—leaving your troubles behind on the open road—which is as comforting now as it always was doomed.
How life in communist Czechoslovakia resembles life, for some, in 21st-century America.
Does art have to be relatable—does it have to mean anything—to be any good? Maybe not at all, as Ira Glass’s rash tweet—and a short novel by Penelope Fitzgerald—reminds us.
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