Category: Essays and Reviews

The Unpostable

I reviewed Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This for Los Angeles Review of Books. My review tries to think through the novel’s style and wit to show how Lockwood evokes the kinds of things that can be expressed both on and off the internet. Read it here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-unpostable-on-patricia-lockwoods-no-one-is-talking-about-this/

A Tale of Two Valleys

For Public Books, I wrote about Anna Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley and the HBO tv show Silicon Valley. In grappling with the history and present of Silicon Valley, these both rely on nineteenth-century narratives and tropes to craft their own visions of contemporary capitalism. Read it here: https://www.publicbooks.org/a-tale-of-two-valleys/

Let Them Eat Cake

For Avidly, a channel of Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about the recent phenomenon of people making cakes that look like things beside cakes. I use a marxist approach to aesthetics to try to understand the way that these cakes are mediating our contemporary experience of capitalism. It’s pretty jokey and somewhat ridiculous, but I think I actually make some useful points about the place of aesthetics and memes in our current moment: http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/07/14/let-them-eat-cake/

Horror in Revision: On the Contemporary Gothic

For LARB, I wrote about three contemporary books that are revising and rewriting gothic novels: Chase Berggrun’s R E D (Birds LLC, 2018), Sarah Perry’s Melmoth (Custom House, 2018), and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (Penguin, 2018). You can read the essay here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/horror-in-revision-on-the-contemporary-gothic/#!