Dispatches

Essays

The Ten Most Notable Science-Fiction Novels of the Past Ten Years

Given how busy we all are, particularly as the pandemic recedes, perhaps we should thank these lists (and their makers) for not wasting our time or abusing our goodwill, but instead helping us hack our way through that ever-growing thicket of anime, books, films, podcasts, manga, radio shows, stage plays, television series, video games, and the endless number of other cultural productions we feel honor-bound to track despite this impulse being a forever-frustrated wish that, to switch metaphors, cultural capital’s always-hungry maw ensures will never be satisfied.

Chicago DNC 2024

The Spectacle in Chicago in 2024

Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.

Closers of Fiction

The Great Closers of Fiction

The best last lines stay with you long after you close the book—some like a welcome sip of fine cognac at the end of a delicious meal, and others, while not neatly wrapping up the story, stirring you to imagine what might happen next.