flâneur

Old Directions | Issue 54 | n+1 | The Editors

nplusonemag.com · 4,733 words · saved by 2 readers

It can feel like listening to Spotify, reading this way. A patchy sampling, in which huge expanses of history are available but unintuitively organized, likely to result in having heard rarities and minor B-sides before getting the full feel of a band or a genre. But that’s no bad thing. In plenty of discographies, the rarities are the best parts.

If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past. There have been notable rewritings, novels that self-consciously lift techniques and plotlines from Perec or Bernhard, from Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield, or—in the odd case of Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect , a beach-read best seller published this summer — from that scene in Couples where somebody hurts his pinkie playing basketball. There have been big novels published this year about becoming old-world by breaking your phone (Transcription),…

saved by

related reading