I’m Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. I was a Humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2012 to 2020. I’ve written fiction, criticism, and reviews. I’ve migrated my blog to The Habit of Tlön over at Substack. I live in Washington, DC.
Current Project
I’m currently working on a book called “Creator-Owned Comics.” It’s about the rise of an idea of creator-ownership in the world of periodical comics in the 1980s and 1990s. I ask how the growing movement to recognize and empower creators—and to re-imagine the artist as an entrepreneur—changed the aesthetic priorities of the comics published on the American direct market. I answer by discussing a set of important comics published by Eclipse, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Image, Vertigo, and Milestone.
2026 Publications
- “Is ‘Literary Fiction’ Just Another Genre Now?” review of Jeremy Rosen, Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025), Chronicle of Higher Education, January 28, 2026.
Books I Wrote
- Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009)
- Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2016)
- The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia University Press, 2022). Corrections here.
Books I Edited
- The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited with Sam Cohen (University of Iowa Press, 2012)
- Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman, edited with Georgiana Banita (2023), part of the Tom Inge Series on Comics Artists series published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Special Issues I Edited
- Publishing American Literature, 1945–2020. With Dan Sinykin. American Literary History
- The 7 Neoliberal Arts. Post45: Contemporaries, 2020.
2025 Publications
- “Peer Review Paranoia,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2025.
- “Modernist Funnies,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, May 20, 2025.
- “Mythic Capital,” Arc, May 1, 2025.
- “Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Strangers in a Strange Land”, review of Abundance (New York: Avid Reader, 2025), Arc, April 22, 2025.
- “‘Boobs + Monsters’: Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Horror Comics, and the Fate of Disciplinary Normalization in the Twenty-First Century,” in Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics, ed. Jorge J. Santos Jr. and Patrick S. Lawrence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025).