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/
Category: Essays and Reviews
Forever Tonight
I wrote a short essay on Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for Hyped on Melancholy. Read it here: https://www.hypedonmelancholy.com/forever-tonight
Do Gay Be Crimes
I reviewed Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System for homintern. You can read it here: https://homintern.soy/issues/11-9-20/sexualhegemony.html
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/
All That Is Solid Melts Into Smoke
For Chicago Review, I wrote a review of HBO’s show High Maintenance. My review tries to understand the conditions of labor depicted by the show and how it reveals the way we stay attached to certain modes of hope and life in contemporary capitalism. Read more here: https://www.chicagoreview.org/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-smoke/
Review of Rachel Ingalls’s Binstead’s Safari
For Full Stop, I reviewed the reissue of Rachel Ingalls’s Binstead’s Safari (New Directions, 2019). Read it here: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/07/09/reviews/adam-fales/binsteads-safari-rachel-ingalls/
Utopia Can Be Banal: The Unfinished Ballad of Kenny Dennis
For Full Stop, I wrote an essay on meta-fiction in the work of the rapper Serengeti, especially his Kenny Dennis projects. You can read it here: https://www.full-stop.net/2018/12/07/features/adam-fales/kennydennis/
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/#!
Odds and Ends: Fictive Probability in Helen DeWitt’s “Some Trick”
For LARB, I reviewed Helen DeWitt’s short story collection Some Trick (New Directions, 2018). My review contextualizes the collection in DeWitt’s larger career and thinks through her simultaneous representation and engagement with her characterization as a “brilliant” writer. Read it here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/odds-and-ends-fictive-probability-in-helen-dewitts-some-trick/
