…is that all authors google themselves. Hi, Sarah Manguso! I liked your book a great deal! I am sorry I read it in the bookstore! Alas, Keith Gessen, I have not read yours yet, but would be happy to accept any review copies you might like to provide in gestures of [...]

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Two things, variations on a theme with other variations, to confront and subsequently integrate:
Emily Gould: edits interesting but problematic blog, writes interesting but problematic blog, writes interesting but problematic Times Magazine article, throughout airs personal insecurities, makes mistakes in public, gets flayed in the media, gets book deal to write about more of same?
This post: [...]

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When I was just graduated from high school and in Iowa City doing a writing workshop, in the summer of 2002, I bought Sarah Manguso’s first book, The Captain Lands in Paradise, from Prairie Lights. I bought it because my poetry teacher told me to, and because I had never seen so many slim [...]

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I do not buy it. I did buy a ticket to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum–stood in line for half an hour and everything, given that it was the show’s last day–but the show wants you to buy so much more: Louis Vuitton handbags and stuffed smiling flowers and all sorts of [...]

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The other day, there was one loafer on the floor of my office lobby. A lonely loafer, respectable brownish-black leather, bright red on the inside.
The first thing I thought: “Who lost one bright-red-inside loafer in the lobby, and how?”
The second: “Now, that could be some great office-lobby art.”
Seriously, though: one loafer, [...]

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Say, hypothetically, that you read Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay crouched on a stepstool at St. Marks Bookshop, quickly, because you have a home to get back to and a job to get up for the next morning and no desire to be half-slept.
First impressions: “spacetime” is an irritating word; those [...]

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Hancock is not a perfect movie–not by a long shot–though not necessarily for the reasons that reviewers have given. Some critics have complained about the “twist,” which I think is more symptomatic of what we might call the Shyamalanization of movie marketing than a problem with the actual movie, which, in fitting narrative fashion, [...]

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