Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket is transcendent and exhausting
The octogenarian author can still conjure magical prose
Amelia Butler-Gallie
Wednesday
Thursday
How F. Scott Fitzgerald anticipated our modern age
The Great Gatsby turns 100 this month
Monday
Inside Thomas Pynchon’s most underrated novel
The Crying of Lot 49 is often hawked as the gateway drug to the writer’s peculiar universe
Thursday
The Exchange will delight anyone seeking an impossible story made possible
This bizarre story would teeter on the incredible if it weren’t wholly true
Monday
Twenty-five years of Fight Club and American Beauty
What the notorious films have to say about masculinity in crisis?
Thursday
The world needs more Lars von Triers
The director has spent his time pushing the boundaries of cinema to the extreme
Monday
The peculiar appeal of ‘sad-girl literature’
Prose style matters less than access to toxic love, pain and suffering… and a light smattering of suicide and violent death
Thursday
Devil in the detail
How do we recognize the real manifestation of evil in the world? Two new books set out to answer this question and prove that it is a timely one
Monday
Suburbia’s irredeemable reputation in the American canon
As it stands, its place as a literary locus in the American canon is a fraught one
Wednesday
Was the psychedelic art movement worth it?
This month marks the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of hippie culture itself
Tuesday
Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumously published novel is unconvincing
Until August has a curiously half-baked feel, as if it’s a souvenir of a great man’s legacy rather than a work in itself
Sunday
Reconsidering Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
If the Thomas Pynchon novel adaptation has anything to say about the American dream, it is to mock its high-falutin’ nature
Tuesday
The peculiar American attitude toward death
Taking our mortality too seriously has been an increasing problem in our country. Thank heavens for the satirists who refuse to do so
Thursday
Fleshing out family history: Ancestry, by Simon Mawer, reviewed
From our UK edition
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us about our ancestors? Cold, hard data is, by definition, neither sentimental nor sympathetic. Or so says Simon Mawer, whose latest novel asks where, in our austere conception of the past as a graveyard of artefacts,
Thursday
Homage to the greatest 18th-century poet you’ve never heard of
From our UK edition
If you were to glance only briefly at the title of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut you might be forgiven for assuming that A Ghost in the Throat was a story about demonic possession — and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Demonic? No. Possession? Certainly. This spectral, arresting and at times disorientating
