— Secret Histories - Siddhartha Deb, The Nation, Jun. 26, 2023
“To the conspirators, Oswald is no more than a useful idiot in their complicated scheme. To history, his role is that of minor infamy, one man in a never-ending series of American “lone nut” shooters and bombers. To DeLillo, however, he is the novel’s pivotal antihero (Oswald being a Libra, the astrological sign for which is the scales of justice). A protagonist with not just one doppelgänger but a multitude of them, Oswald finally offers DeLillo a character sufficiently fragmented and manipulated for a fictional paradigm trying to grasp the misfitting puzzle pieces of a fragmented world.”
— How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City - Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, Jul. 3, 2023
“In the late nineteen-sixties, semi-separated from Hacker and occasionally living in communes in New York and San Francisco, Delany wrote the novels that made his name in American science fiction. He won his first Nebula Award for “Babel-17,” the story of a poet-linguist’s race to decipher a consciousness-scrambling language virus aboard a starship called the Rimbaud. He won a second for “The Einstein Intersection” (1967), a retelling of the Orpheus legend set on a future Earth where alien settlers who venerate the Beatles strive to “template” themselves on their vanished human predecessors. Delany’s precise language and iridescent imagery—flying motorbikes called “pteracycles,” space currents cast as “red and silver sequins flung in handfuls”—distinguished him in a genre whose authors still often boasted about never revising their work. Major critics soon recognized him as one of the most talented science-fiction writers of his generation.”
— The Tyranny of the Tale - Parul Seghal, The New Yorker, Jul. 3, 2023
“Return to storytelling’s primal scene: Scheherazade telling tales in order to live to see another dawn. Before it is anything else, a story is a way we can speak to one another without necessarily being ourselves; that is its risk and relief, its portable privacy. The fact that children ask for stories at night is used to defend the notion of storytelling as natural, deeply human—a defense against the dark. But Margaret Wise Brown, the author of “Goodnight Moon,” was convinced that children didn’t care much about plot; it was their parents who did. When children ask for stories, what they’re asking for is the presence of the adult. One wonders just whom Scheherazade was regaling in that room. When did her gaze shift from the king to the children, as it must have? What kind of armor did she think she was providing them?”
— Where be your jibes now? - Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books, Jul. 13, 2023
“Time will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.”
Currently reading: [redacted]
Currently listening: Yoshiko - YOSHUMIDZU