Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Criticism

  • interrupt your text

    McKenzie Wark interviewed at Bomb Magazine: I’m interested in writing that engages with the way people read now. If you are a literary person, perhaps you and your friends are on Twitter or Instagram and share photos of favorite passages from the books you happen to be reading. I certainly do. So, I wanted the…

  • the axioms others take for granted are painful

    In which Stewart Hotston, a writer I was heretofore utterly ignorant of, propels himself into my need-to-read list: In the end all storytelling is political. There is no ‘entertainment only’ version of storytelling because for someone in the audience the axioms others take for granted are painful, disempowering and even oppressive. Only those who are…

  • many bodies have borne the burden or paid the price / cli-fi as null category

    Lindsay Lerman discusses What “Climate Fiction” Does. (They’re her air-quotes, by the way, although I’m in full agreement with her reasons for using them.) … it is crucial that we recognize that, ultimately, there is no “cli-fi” and “not cli-fi.” All fiction has to grapple with place or setting in some way, and fiction often…

  • not oppositional, but negatory

    An interview with M John Harrison by Jonathan Lethem, done earlier this year at Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires; scroll down for the (original) version in English. (Hat-tip to the man himself for linking to it.) I recall joking to a colleague a few years back that part of me wished Harrison wrote…

  • Beyond the Narrative Arc

    Patterns other than the wave, though, are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.” Spiral: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus. Meander: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a…