Companion to "The Book Nobody Can Recommend." That essay argues fiction's distinctive offer is an occupiable position — a stance you can sit inside long enough to meet its costs. This one is the working table that follows from it, kept separate because it is a tool rather than an argument. Genre labels sort by … Continue reading What Each Shelf Is Asking
Tag: Literary Theory
The Book Nobody Can Recommend
A critic can recommend a book that changed him. What he cannot do is recommend, at scale and in advance, the book that would change him next — because what a critic sells is continuity of criteria, and that book's whole function is to break them. This isn't a complaint about any particular paper. It's … Continue reading The Book Nobody Can Recommend
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