A Progressive on the Prairie

Scarlett Thomas likes to write about big ideas. She doesn’t deviate from that in her latest novel, Our Tragic Universe. In fact, the novel is built around portentous issues like immortality and whether we are all living in a simulated universe — and the storyless story.

That’s right, the storyless story. Essentially, [...]

I recently read an an interesting comparison between two dominant strands of how we approach reading a book, particularly for reviewing — the journalistic approach and the literary criticism approach. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the observations, it does fairly define those approaches and, as this review demonstrates, I find myself largely [...]