I link

‘I’ve long had a game that I play at the end of long […]

Capitalism hoodwinks us daily

‘Ours is a bleakly utilitarian era. Every act, it seems, must be overtly […]

Love flooded in her like a spill of paint

‘Love flooded in her like a spill of paint, blooming across her consciousness […]

All fear gives way: the light / Looks after you

This is Louise Glück’s ‘The Undertaking’: […]

The name might as well have been graven in stone

Miss Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter in flawlessly […]

To the very edge of its collapse

‘When I make a work I often take it to the very edge […]

Absolute truth will eventually put their paining hearts at ease

‘I leave behind heavy hearts. I wish I could dry the tears from […]

All my works serve the particular people I am filming

‘For me, filmmaking is not that complicated. If you make a film about […]

And almost he can remember this

‘It is / Something he could do when he was very young, // […]

Rhythmic and rippling and periphrastic

‘So what is Spear? Well, Hild, but with magic – Hild let off […]

Not the coherent myth of the American century but its unruly shadow

‘There’s a certain tenuousness to Winogrand’s photos; the compositions hold together, but just […]

Visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence

‘I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but […]

After all, guilt is scaled to individuals

‘These are just questions. Please don’t care too much about them. As you […]

The joins are perfect

‘All good writing is honest in the sense that it says what the […]

The only colour that matters is green

‘The addition of music from Schooly D, one of the originators of Gangster […]

Spewing forth from a haze of static were vocals thick with rage

‘A gentle hiss filled his ears. […]

I was as incapable of turning away as were the trees

‘ “Katya!” A woman’s voice echoed from the house on the hill, muffled only […]

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

‘10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. […]

You can see the saltations in the sky on a clear day

‘Usually the surveys came back safely, and no one was lost. Zivia told […]

So we’re all out here laboring in our own individual ruts

‘All this pertains to the concept of the “brightweb” I threw out half-seriously […]

But even then, none of the information I retrieved seemed legible

‘ “All of this. The houses, the decorations, this arrangement you have. The way […]

The emulation of the American Dream is a great hoax

‘5.1 Revolutionary Woman #3 – Code Name: Dolores […]

Mr Truman’s Degree

‘When I say that to choose to kill the innocent as a means […]

The Extractivism of Setting and the Traitor’s Text

‘Canon is a tricky word. I am using the term lightly; I mean […]

A testament to the art of reading

‘I once asked some students how fast they could read, and one of […]

Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden

‘If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great […]

Long, but never boring

‘Seven years in the making, The Book of Love – long, but never […]

To Return to Innocence From the Other Side

‘I love films that describe the world as a complex, mixed world, and […]

We are living in the century of fear

‘That peculiar mixture of excitement and fear, of melancholy and joy, of boredom […]

Refusing Genocide

‘And the other trick that happens in that Pete Davidson monologue is that, […]

a bullet-stream / of oyster shells

Part of Dana Levin’s ‘The Living Teaching’: ‘So all hail to me― / […]

Brian Evenson on Leslie Norris

‘Leslie was a huge influence on my writing. […] He was very good […]

Possibilities

‘Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination. […] The […]

I won’t say any more

Everything that can be said has been said in the film; I won’t […]

Oscar

‘Nobody liked him in the valley. The elements who went to chapel thought […]

In Dreams

‘Lynch also frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative. One […]

The Black Locomotive

‘The shaft was the negative equivalent of a skyscraper, an absence driven into […]

Anything goes inbetween

‘Scorsese always tells them they have to start a certain place, and they […]

The Shout

‘Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty,had a queer, not unpleasant face. […]

Sunday in the Trees

‘I still hadn’t taken my eyes off the zelkovas. They were rooted at […]

The Mark on the Wall

‘A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, […]

Sun

‘She knew the sun in heaven, blue-molten with his white fire edges, throwing […]

The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie

She’d been right, after all. He had been named after a star. […]

How we value human lives

‘If anything good can come of these two tragedies, I hope it’s that […]

Tiananmen

This is James Fenton’s ‘Tiananmen’ […]

The Nomenclature of Fear

‘After a time, I no longer heard my words but only the sound […]

Guest

‘For a split-second his pupils flare, and his nostrils, and he raises his […]

You Shall Know Them by Their Pitchforks

‘Our memories from before do not add up. Some of us remember a […]

My standard for verisimilitude

‘My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I […]

Morning Song

I love the precision of the pauses in ‘Morning Song’, particularly the semicolon […]

The Kromlau Gambit

‘Severed of flesh and earth, the dog’s soul remembered. It remembered wolf and […]

Corwick Grows

‘But then I see how the limits of the city have changed. The […]

The Color of Distance

‘Ani’s ears lifted, this time in surprise. Deep work was dangerous. She remembered […]

Gravity of the Flux

Miami Vice is above all a great film on the human condition in […]

Dystopia for Realists

‘Calls for accountability and transparency might sound technocratic and unambitious. But the right […]

Real Tigers

‘Cigarette smouldering in hand he shambled into the lane, a coronet of smoke […]

Follow the Ecstasy

‘When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that […]

My model’s more the European

‘I write crime novels, so yes, of course I think of myself as […]