Press

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LitHub calls my essay about Holocaust fiction a "review you need to read this week."

LitHub calls the same essay one of "the most scathing book reviews of 2022."

Anyone who writes a novel titled Fuccboi and certainly any publisher that decides to release a book under that name must be hoping on some level that they will inspire a blistering denunciation of everything wrong with the current generation. You can’t buy that kind of press. [Ann] Manov’s review asking “Has Fuccboi killed literature?” delivers.

Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic recommended my Mary Gaitskill essay on November 28, 2021, which  unfortunately predates his "Best of Journalism/Recommended Reading" emails' migration to Substack by one month (🤬).

In his monthly roundup on "new and noteworthy" criticism, The Criterion Collection's David Hudson highlighted my essay on Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1961 film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The essay drew on original archival research spanning several decades to argue that it was a secret and intentionally hidden adaptation of the forgotten Argentinean masterpiece, La Invención de Morel (1940). Remarking that the piece is in "full-throttle 'j'accuse!' mode," he called it "a rich and rewarding read, regardless of whether you are as eager and willing as she is to incriminate the screenwriter."

Yost’s essay provoked a brilliantly written riposte by Ann Manov. Manov is unconvinced, to say the least. She says the case is overblown, there aren’t hordes of avant-garde youngsters engaging in prayerful devotion. She maintains that this is just another grasp at gaining attention by members of a generation whose brains are profoundly warped by social media, a naff attempt at personal branding on territory as yet unmonopolized by the mainstream. 

Then there is the authenticity question. According to Ann Manov, writing for UnHerd, “there is something shocking about the “Catholic revival” driven by downtown New York scenesters – that is, the phenomenon of attractive, highly social ketamine enthusiasts saying they are Catholic.”  Regarding a recent article in the New York Times – “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church” – Manov claims the shocking thing “is not, primarily, its subjects’ half-hearted prostitution of Catholic imagery”, but “the seeming guilelessness with which its author Julia Yost, editor of the established conservative journal First Things, seems to take them at their word.”

The debates are old, the commie arguments bad as ever—though Lukács’s argument for critical realism is worth taking seriously, unlike Sartre’s for committed literature—and, yes, they’re somehow now discussed as if new, hip, relevant, and even unanswerable, which is all that could make the lifeless prose seem stimulating. I read 20 pages of Sally Rooney once but thought it sounded like a Netflix pitch; maybe it gets better, but then again death is bearing down, and I can’t finish every novel I browse over at the library. Manov contrasts her with Mann—“These just aren’t the kind of books, such as, I don’t know, The Magic Mountain, that teach you ‘how to live[.]’”

Big Discourse Energy podcast discusses my Fuccboi review.

This real estate website, in a piece discussing the "Spectacular Japanese-Inspired Modern Retreat" that features in Showtime's American Gigolo quotes at length from my review of the series (?).