(From Arcade.) MOOC is, let’s face it, an ugly acronym. As almost everyone in the world of higher education learned this past academic year, it stands for Massive Open Online Course.  Despite its inelegance, the word has gained a life of its own — a (not always positive) conjuring power on the lips of pundits, […]

Since I last blogged here, a lot of new writing by me has appeared online. 1. #OccupyGaddis I’ve written a number of posts related to this past summer’s Big Read, #OccupyGaddis. Here’s the complete lineup (which repeat some I listed below) in chronological order: “#OccupyGaddis” (June 8, 2012) “The Failure of William Gaddis” (June 15, […]

Over at the LARBlog, I’ve written a pair of posts announcing the start of #OccupyGaddis, a collective summer reading of William Gaddis’s monumental 1975 novel, J R. From my original post: First, get yourself a copy of the J R, either at your local bookstore, your local megachain, online, an unusually literate yard sale, or–you’d […]

(Crossposted from Arcade.) “Must literary studies confine itself to the margins of the publishing field?” asks Andrew Goldstone in the first of what promises to be an important series of blog posts on John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Noting that Thompsons’s amazing account of the publishing field omits […]

I wrote a riposte to Stuart Moulthrop’s essay, “See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media,” in the electronic book review. Halfway through “Fearful Symmetry,” the fifth issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic graphic narrative Watchmen, an assassin tries to kill the world’s smartest man. Adrian Veidt, the Watchman formerly known as […]

I’ve written yet another LARB book review, this time on Ben Marcus’s fascinating The Flame Alphabet. In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes announced the revolutionary overthrow of the writer by the reader. Building on the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” Barthes argued that a ceaseless […]

My review of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus is now available at LARB. A taste: In the 1991 second volume of his classic graphic novel Maus, published five years after the first, Art Spiegelman briefly — and dramatically — drops the conceit for which his book is so famous. For seven pages, instead of depicting himself as […]

The Los Angeles Review of Books also published my interview with Helen DeWitt (alongside my review and Scott Esposito’s review of Lightning Rods). My favorite answer that Helen gave? I read James Wood’s review of White Teeth, in which he introduced the term “hysterical realism,” a long while back: He complained of novels obsessed with […]

In their infinite wisdom, the Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Helen DeWitt’s very funny second novel, Lightning Rods. Helen DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000 to almost universally rapturous praise. It sold a hundred thousand copies in English. If literary publishing were a rational enterprise, even along […]

The Believer published my review of Andrew Altschul’s Deus Ex Machina — or rather the character of Sarah Palin as she is depicted in that novel — in September. Andrew Altschul’s second novel, Deus Ex Machina, tells the story of The Deserted, a reality-television program limping into its thirteenth season with low ratings and a […]