Apocalypse Now? What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Believe

Many of Stephen Hawking’s final written words presage doom. Clearly no amount of knowledge can resist a looming apocalypse. “We Continue reading →

Cyberpunk 1.0: Visions of the Future

Growing up in the 1990s, the cyberpunk aesthetic was the commonly accepted vision of the future. Every form of media, Continue reading →

Seoul Stories: Han Kang, Violence and Candlelight

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of Continue reading →

The Phenomenology of Language in David Abram’s ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’

I really do consider this a truly paradigm-shifting book even though I didn’t buy into all of the assumptions written Continue reading →

The Infinite Labyrinth of Time in Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”

In his story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges explores the labyrinth, the writer, and perhaps above all, Continue reading →

The Mexican Subject: Semantics, Violence and the Female Aspect

Given the recent debates from both the GOP and the Democratic party the subject of the Mexican individual has been Continue reading →

Calvino’s Cosmicomics: Time and the Hunter (or t zero)

To me, there’s virtually no doubt that Italo Calvino is a literary genius. Each one of his works create either Continue reading →

Creating a Character, 2: Bernard Malamud and J.G. Ballard

The question remains: How does a skilled writer establish a good character in so few pages? And how does it relate to their overall style and composition?

Abjection and the Real

Psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and her predecessor Jacques Lacan have baffled graduate students for years due to their opaque and relentless Continue reading →

Hemingway and Modernity’s Necropolis

The works of Ernest Hemingway have always aimed to elucidate the looming presence of death as it follows his characters Continue reading →

Simulacrum in Literature: Baudrillard and Barthelme

Simulacrum, like many terms surrounding postmodernism, has been defined in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest definition of the Continue reading →

Time-Tearing with Philip K. Dick

I like Philip K. Dick. His ideas are intriguing and his writing is more than passable by my standards. I Continue reading →

Creating a Character: Carver and Cheever

The short story, the ever neglected cousin of the novel, requires many of the same techniques used in the composition Continue reading →

Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip and Pragmatic Knowledge

Philip K. Dick is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century. His prose is Continue reading →

Borges and Murakami: Philosophy in Fiction

Borges and Murakami Philosophy in fiction has had a long and storied history, from the mythology of Ancient Greece to Continue reading →

Is Postmodernism Self-Defeating?

In academia postmodernism is nearly impossible to avoid. Characters like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard (and many others of course), Continue reading →

The Failed Übermensch: A Marxist Reading of Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the turmoil, and tribulations of the societal exclusion of 19th century Russia’s lower class. Raskolnikov, Continue reading →

Borges and the Book of Infinity

If the Library of Babel is a library that is all libraries, then what if there was a book that is all books? What if, in the pages of a book, one could find infinity itself?

Fernando Pessoa and Nietzsche: The Last Man and Happiness

“Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the Continue reading →

Kafka, Orwell, Huxley: The Surveillance State in Literature

Even since the days before the Edward Snowden revelations there have been comparisons made between the powers of the NSA Continue reading →

Borges and Calvino: Invisible Cities and Dreams

  …Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s Continue reading →

When Fiction Lives In Fiction

Fantastic Borges essay on the history of meta-fiction and its role in literature. After a thorough search of Google I couldn’t Continue reading →

Borges’ Dreamtigers

  A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images Continue reading →

Paranoia in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly

paranoia /ˌparəˈnɔɪə/ noun a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically worked into an Continue reading →

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Another Borges book. Another 5 stars. I mean this man is so brilliant I’m starting to turn into a dithering Continue reading →

Proletarianization in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

‘cannot you see […] that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really Continue reading →

The Influence of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’

I’ve never been so indecisive about what to rate a book as I have been with Kafka’s The Trial. Upon Continue reading →

Bioy Casares: Time Images in The Invention of Morel

Ok, so I decided to pick this up as I found out Bioy was a friend of Borges (who just Continue reading →