“Well, what do you make of it?”

A small boy, stunned by the circus-poster effect of the old man’s attire, blinked, in need of nudging. The old man nudged:

“My shirt, boy! What do you see!?” Continue reading

Several days ago a friend asked what I thought of my iPad. I didn’t answer right away, as we were communicating via instant message, and typing more than a few words on said device is a miserable process; and more than a few words are needed. The iPad is a marvelous device — but that only makes its flaws more profound. It’s also a political object, an embodiment of two deep and opposed forces in Apple’s corporate soul: toolmaker and marketer. Continue reading

Somewhere inside Anthony Lane is the little boy he once was, and that little boy is annoying as fuck and probably doesn’t like Halloween, either.
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The first story in Tao Lin’s Bed — entitled “Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists”,  in which a young-twentysomething relationship dissolves as the man slips into self-centered torpor, delivered by Lin in a smartly faux-slacker voice that nearly veils, and thus magnifies, an underlying desperation — is excellent. Continue reading

If Thomas Pynchon had a daughter who learned from his mistakes, that daughter would be Nicola Barker, author of Darkmans.
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Guillermo Del Toro uses horror-movie tropes to set an atmosphere that is frightening, but not too frightening. A door swinging shut, a grotesque doll, a ghost child: they’re less vehicles of fear than a vernacular of suspensefulness with which to tell a story of maternal loss and devotion.
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A potentially great plot; one wishes it was Jesse Ball’s third or fourth novel, rather than his first. Betrayed by the clunkiness of his protagonist, who after a few chapters as half nebbish, half cipher — a person empty of desire, initiative and introspection — becomes capable, as if a page were turned, of eloquence, volition and insight.

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