RaveThe New YorkerThe book is a historical reconsideration of the movement and a gripping narrative of political resistance told in short vignettes ... Merchant ably demonstrates the dire stakes of the Luddites’ plight ... The book offers plenty of satisfying imagery for the twenty-first-century reader experiencing techlash.
Mark McGurl
MixedThe New RepublicMcGurl dissects this state of affairs in a relatively nonjudgmental way: Rather than arguing that Amazon is destroying literature, or devaluing the artistic act, he attempts to figure out what the house style of the Amazon Era actually is—a style that the author almost perversely enjoys over the course of the book, as part anthropologist and part fan ... The reductiveness of McGurl’s arguments, like laws of physics but for culture, doesn’t hamper their utility or their accuracy: He usually seems right ... McGurl is on firm ground when he is analyzing the mass-market literature created and discovered on KDP, the genre-fiction e-books that are eating into the traditional market for Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy. But his account of Amazon’s effects on literary fiction is less convincing. Everything and Less doesn’t present any evidence that Amazon’s algorithm incentivizes novelists like Knausgaard or Ben Lerner to write in a certain style, or that it even accounts for their popularity, relative to other, lesser-known contemporary novelists. And, meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that successful authors still owe their reputations in large part to the traditional apparatus of literary publishing: their acceptance by established editors at traditional imprints, followed by appreciative reviews in newspapers and magazines, followed by profiles in lifestyle sections, followed by a respectable stream of sales ... consumers might find in McGurl’s book a warning to stay as far away as possible and seek out better forms of discovery than Amazon’s website, like visiting an indie bookstore, asking a friend, or reading a magazine—looking for anything but what rises to the top of the feed.
Patricia Lockwood
RaveThe New RepublicComposed of brief fragments, the novel is like Lockwood texting you her thoughts in so many pixelated blue bubbles, as she finds pleasure in the web’s absurdity and uses its native language joyfully to heighten her own ... In disembodied fragments of thought, anecdote, and piercing observation, we get glimpses of her life, like unsigned blog posts on an obscure website, unified primarily by Lockwood’s mellifluous tone ... These ephemeral references, almost verbal tics, capture the distorting effect that Twitter has on everyone trying to exist on the platform ... The novel can be read as a stirring meditation on grief or a vicarious confrontation with the joys and risks of motherhood ... It can be disorienting to read a book that has the density of Twitter, and yet Lockwood insistently makes the text glow. It’s more prose poetry than narrative; every other line seems to contain some spark of the transcendental ... Meme-spotting is a fun game, but it’s Lockwood’s poetic vision that animates the novel, embedded in yet not limited to the internet ... It’s a testament to Lockwood’s capacity as a writer that a line describing the full moon as a \'thicc snack\'—that is, deliciously large and invested with erotic potential—lands as a moment of eloquence, a gesture at the communal innovation of language, rather than a banality or inside joke ... articulates one version of lived experience now, with more authenticity than many writers who don’t venture too far outside the lines of literary acceptability, as if trying not to get their hands dirty with internet juice.
Jerry Saltz
MixedThe New RepublicThough the book presents plenty of threads to follow if the reader wants to go deeper, it doesn’t fully connect the activities of the artist with their roots in art history or conceptual innovation ... This version of living like an artist evokes something closer to corporatized mindfulness, a heightened attentiveness to the world for the sake of problem-solving (and maybe renting a loft). Art here suggests self-discovery and self-expression without risk; creativity means things you can Instagram. Throughout the book, Saltz presents an uneven mix of pat statements on the nature of art, overenthusiastic self-help...and a handful of hard-earned critical insights ... The book is better as a guide to looking at and cultivating your own taste in art than actually making it ... Not to begrudge anyone a long-standing position within an institution, but I’d rather hear about money from the bevy of younger art writers who can only dream of a staff title or column when a few New York City staff critics have reigned for so long ... The purpose of art here seems to be as entertainment or luxury, a passionate hobby, not a force that actively shapes the way we see our society, what we expect from our lives, and thus the world itself.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveThe New RepublicKate Zambreno’s new novel...was not written with a pandemic in mind, of course. But the pandemic might be the best context in which to read it. An autofictional portrayal of stasis, indecision, and the difficulty of living in a civilization that seems to have passed its expiration date some years previously, the novel already exists in a hazy state of self-isolation. Reading it now, you don’t have to be a published writer or an adjunct professor to identify deeply with the author-narrator as she works from home eternally supine, wanders the confines of her neighborhood, takes photographs of her dog, watches YouTube videos, and tries to figure out if creating anything is possible. This spiky book, with its fragmented prose and Sebaldian black-and-white photos, has become unexpectedly relatable ... maintains a gentle and yet compulsive flow, like the autoplay of the next Netflix episode. As Zambreno writes, \'Drifts is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing.\' ... Part diary and part Künstlerroman, Drifts skips around, swapping one subject for the next when a thought trails off, when attention or concentration flags ... There’s an improvisatory quality to the text, like a wet-painted brushstroke ... As intricate and finely tuned as this kind of writing is, it runs up against its limits fairly quickly .. The book’s limited perspective makes Drifts claustrophobic, a claustrophobia that is part of the effect but can be frustrating nonetheless. .
Kate Briggs
MixedThe MillionsTo read a book of fragments is to dive into a kind of rockslide ... Kate Briggs’s This Little Art (also from Fitzcarraldo), a highly fragmented essay on translation, particularly her exercise translating Roland Barthes, is challenging. Briggs writes of grammar, dance, philosophy, London, motherhood in pieces of varying size (single sentences to many pages) and academic complexity. Yet as it accelerates it attains a rhythm and Briggs’s ideas—translation as movement, a way of writing-by-reading—coalesce not by explanation but inference. This Little Art looks long but it contains a lot of empty space.
