(Portland Oregon and Brooklyn, NY: Tin House Books, 2016) When my brother, Chris, and I are in the mood for some good old fashioned apocalyptic prognosticating, we like to discuss the so-called Singularity. This idea, which has circulated ever more … Continued
(Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago, 2016) It’s worth being reminded, from time to time, that monsters don’t really exist. At least not in the way we typically imagine them: hulking, abhorrent beasts that are the walking embodiment of inhuman evil. John … Continued
Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2016) There’s something I don’t quite trust about light. Maybe it’s the disconnect between the seemingly arbitrary speed at which it travels and the fundamental role that speed serves … Continued
I first met Brian Bradford underneath a sign that read “The Meeting Place.” We were in London’s Heathrow airport, waiting for a bus to pick us up and deliver us to a ten day writing residency in the secluded English … Continued
(New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015) The culture of modern video games, in which I’m as hopelessly embedded as the culture of literature, has a special affinity for broken translations. Since so many of the great games from the 1980s and … Continued
(The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror. New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2015) In the early 1930s, physicists discovered something in nature that, even now, seems to me to be completely absurd. They called their discovery … Continued
(Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2015) Coming into my adult life in the post-9/11, bubble-and-burst epoch of my country’s history, I have formed some jumbled impressions of what precisely other people mean when they refer to ‘The American Dream.’ It … Continued
Translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015) The narrator of Max Blecher’s semi-autobiographical novel, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, is a tree. Understandably, he is desperate for his love interest, Edda, to understand. It … Continued
Translated from the Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2014) Being a free and independent woman for the first time in her life, the narrator of Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is eager to collect … Continued
(On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014) In July of 2014, employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered, in a cold storage facility unused for decades, several vials that contained living strains of the smallpox virus. When confronted with the … Continued
Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel (Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books, 2014) When Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, perhaps the most jarring conclusion drawn from his new vision of the universe was that time itself … Continued
Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchvary (New York, NY: New Directions, 2013) Every summer, my family and I embark on a week-long vacation to rural New Hampshire. There is a small “old world” style resort there, replete with century … Continued