Blog Posts

Since I published The Last Samurai Reread in 2022, I have been keeping a running list of errors in the book. Various readers, including Helen DeWitt, have discovered various mistakes. Indeed, Helen was kind enough to offer extremely detailed feedback, for which I am very grateful. It took a long time for me to compile a definitive … Continue reading Corrections to “The Last Samurai Reread.”

Since I published Cool Characters in 2016, I’ve been extremely indecisive about what I want my next academic book project to be. As anyone who has run into me at a conference knows, I seem to very confidently claim to be writing a different book every few months. Meanwhile, I wrote a shortish book on … Continue reading On Creator-Owned Comics

A lot of new writing to report. The biggest news is that The Last Samurai Reread was finally released for Columbia University Press’s Rereadings Series. It’s a study of Helen DeWitt’s great 2000 novel. Bits of it were published in Bookforum (😢) and Public Books. I’ve been very grateful for the review attention the book … Continue reading A Busy Year

This is the script of the talk I gave at MLA in January 2020 for a panel called “The State of the Single-Author Study,” organized by Sheila Liming, and featuring great talks by E. L. McCallum, Mike Miley, Matthew Luter, and Robert Ryan. I’ve made a few modifications to the text. It’s a highly stylized … Continue reading The Single-Author Study (still not prestigious)

(Crossposted on Substack) This is a short story I published with the anthology Flight #008 way back in 2017. The site with the stories seems to be down, so I thought I’d republish my contribution here. The Girl Who Almost Became a Zombie I pushed through the crowd of dancing protesters and came to the … Continue reading Yet More Zombies

(Originally published on Substack.) In 2014, I published a chapter on contemporary muckraking fiction in the edited collection, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. The chapter is on fiction by Chris Bachelder and Robert Newman. The essay’s driving question: in an era that has spawned numerous dystopian novels—an era apparently so in … Continue reading Interview: The Future of the Political Novel

(First published on Substack.) These are my notes for the MLA roundtable I participated in this year, “Contemporary Autofiction,” organized by Ralph Clare and featuring great talks by Timothy Bewes, Annabel Kim, and E. L. McCallum. I. In my remarks today, I want to propose that autofiction, or at least its contemporary variation, is not … Continue reading Autofiction and Autoreification

(Originally published on Substack.) Last year, I joined a group-read of scholars who were reading Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, Dune, and discussing it on Twitter, in anticipation of the new Denis Villeneuve movie. The movie got delayed till 2021, but the discussion we had, under the hashtag #DuneBookClub, was a lot of fun, … Continue reading “Dune,” Reaction

(This was originally posted on Substack.) On November 16th, I had the good fortune to be a respondent at a Columbia University Seminar in Literary Theory meeting on Sianne Ngai’s new book Theory of the Gimmick. (Sianne was the main speaker.) Below you’ll find the script I used as the basis of my opening remarks. … Continue reading Gimmick-Notes