Rave4ColumnsThe publication of Black and Blur feels like nothing less than an ecstatic occasion—both in and of itself, and as a promissory note of more to come ... Simply put, Moten is offering up some of the most affecting, most useful, theoretical thinking that exists on the planet today—a true leg out of the rut so much criticism has fallen into of pointing out how a certain phenomenon has both subversive and hegemonic effects (\'kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive,\' as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once put it) that has proven so durable since (at least) Foucault ... As moved and impressed as I am by Moten’s writing—its spectacular range, its unending nuance, its voluminousness, its flashes of pique...its swerve and song—I’m perhaps even more inspired by its felt understanding and communication of what it means to be \'sent by sociality to sociality,\' and its depth of commitment to enmeshment, manifest in its style, orientation, and sound ... Moten’s essays bypass the paranoid logic that has come to characterize \'the academy of misery\' and instead snowball forth via odd procedures like rubbing, blurring, deviation, infodump, and accretion.
Ben Lerner
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksA generous, provocative, ambitious Chinese box of a novel, 10:04 is a near-perfect piece of literature, affirmative of both life and art, written with the full force of Lerner’s intellectual, aesthetic, and empathetic powers, which are as considerable as they are vitalizing … The book’s ‘meta’ strategy is a tight-wire act that could easily fall, in less savvy, stringent, or searching hands, into tinny satire or obnoxious spectacle. Instead, 10:04 is a captivating, moving tour de force … Futurity is 10:04’s principal concern, be it the future of the sinking metropolis of New York, the future of art, the future of capitalism, the future of the planet, or the future embodied by unborn human children … Its rigors and pleasures remain in service of nuance, of negotiation, of continuance.
