Culture Trust

Columns

The Lunatic Face of Fiction

Olivia Parkes

April 10, 2018

On its fortieth anniversary: Joy Williams's “The Changeling” cracked the carapace of literary realism.

This Could Revolutionize That

Kieran Dahl

April 05, 2018

Mindlessly in thrall to Silicon Valley, the media can't stop repeating the phrase "could revolutionize" in its headlines.

The Garbage Man

Will Meyer

April 04, 2018

Meet Sidney Torres: New Orleans trash king, private police chief, reality TV star, and, possibly, the next Trump.

Lost in Boston

Matt Hanson

April 03, 2018

On the fiftieth anniversary of Astral Weeks: we're a long way from Boston's music scene in 1968.

No Mothers, No Daughters

Jessa Crispin

March 27, 2018

Taken from the introduction to How to Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ, forthcoming from University of Texas Press. I have a vision. The streets of midtown Manhattan are filled with all of the professors, professional critics, editors, and judges of award panels. They ...

The Book of No Despair

J.W. McCormack

March 26, 2018

Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Modernist masterpiece with a new translation, makes hapless animals of us all.

Dr. Zuckerstein’s Monster

Gary Greenberg

March 23, 2018

Victor Frankenstein wasn’t cut out to be an avenging hero.

What in God’s Name Happened to Ricky Gervais?

Brendan James

March 22, 2018

Somewhere over the last decade, Ricky Gervais lost it. His nosedive is fairly puzzling: in just a few years, the man who inaugurated a new era of TV with The Office went from one of the most original voices in comedy to a complete gasbag. His stand-up comedy is excruciating, his ...

Fucking the Patriarch

Jennifer Schaffer

March 21, 2018

In three new novels, women protagonists overturn the "sage older man seduces beautiful ingénue" trope.

As Stalin Lay Dying

John Ganz

March 20, 2018

Is The Death of Stalin too good to be true, or not true enough to be good?

Condo-Maximum

Kyle Paoletta

March 08, 2018

What's going on with bland, shoddy architecture in the wake of urban repopulation?

Fear of a Black Universe

Kaila Philo

February 21, 2018

Can Marvel's Black Panther carry the torch of Black radicalism?