“This fourteenth has been, so far, an eschatological sort of century.”
—AK Blakemore, DOOM PAINTING (2026)
The modernists interpolated the Ancient Greeks, and Dante, because they felt tragic and like they had been to hell, so we probably need to look to the medieval because we are all serfs and eschatology is once again a major flavor of the times
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How many people voted in the Best TV Shows of the century poll, and how much higher was that number than the number of people who voted in the Best Books of the century poll?
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Salt Lakes is one of my favorite books of the year and it was such a joy to have Caroline as our first guest in this incredible space
reclusebooks.com/item/KbKT8p…
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Did an interview about the bookstore where I said “I am a terrible business owner because I am basically allergic to making money” and they didn’t quote me on it! So hard to find honest journalism these days. Everything is just puff pieces.
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I probably will not be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend because the R Train service is a little unreliable once you get down here in Texas
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So the thing is that Neutral Milk Hotel are actually even better than we gave them credit for being. You can’t even do “cringe” revisionism because it’s all so relentlessly DIY, so clumsily sincere, and so obviously unconcerned with being fashionable.
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Even though it didn’t make the shortlist, I will continue to go to bat for The Vivisectors. I didn’t find it cynical, or nihilistic, the way that some critics did. I found it a hopeful book about reconstructing a shared reality, as I wrote back in May:
defector.com/the-vivisectors…
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