the piquant qualia of a lived, albeit bizarrely lived, experience
These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef.
[...] Serious, real, conscientious, aware, ambitious art is not a grey thing. It has never been a grey thing and it is not a grey thing now. This is why fiction in a grey time may not be grey. And why the titles of all but one or two of the best works of Neiman Marcus Nihilism are going to induce…
[...] Of course it's true that an unprecedented number of young Americans have big disposable incomes, fine tastes, nice things, competent accountants, access to exotic intoxicants, attractive sex partners, and are still deeply unhappy. All right. Some good fiction has held up a mercilessly powder-…
There's a marvelously apposite Heidegger quotation here, but I'll spare you.
love this quote. referring to our literary innocence being taken away without anything substantial to replace it
