A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—Recently
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6.22.08
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely. But despite the challenges, the story is enormously charming;…
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6.17.08
Eagleton tackles tattoos
On After Theory
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6.16.08
On the difference between liberalism and socialism
On After Theory
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6.14.08
The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
Klein expertly and devastatingly reveals the history behind a model of capitalism that first fed on disaster, then fomented it.
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6.14.08
Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday. Perhaps the writer I most admire.
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6.14.08
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
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6.14.08
Limbo
Bernard Wolfe
A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines. Deeply misogynistic and perverse; the B-film…
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6.14.08
The Ecocriticism Reader
Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm
An introductory collection in literary ecology, the movement that aims to do for environmentalism what gender and race studies did for civil rights.
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6.14.08
Tragedy versus comedy
On After Theory and The Comedy of Survival
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6.14.08
The Comedy of Survival
Joseph Meeker
Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption. The…
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6.14.08
On the two cultures
On After Theory
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6.14.08
First things first
It is impossible to write an effective first post on a blog.
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6.13.08
After Theory
Terry Eagleton
