Capsule reviews.

Essay collections, non-alcoholic tequila, psychosexual saxophones.

Ornament and Silence (Kennedy Fraser)

At some point in my mid-twenties my feelings about the abundance of writing, in particular of essay collections, took a sharp dark turn. I began to feel deeply hopeless about any volume of collected reviews or essays or review-essays, not because they were bad, but because they were good, and yet so many of them were out of print or seemed heading that way. Reading a collection of essays felt like putting a skull on my desk, except more harrowing, or carrying the same bucket of rocks back and forth across the same field, which Dostoevsky says somewhere is the one thing nobody can do without going insane.

I used to think this feeling had something to do with a longing for immortality, but I don’t think that’s it, it’s more about living in a un-literary culture.¹ Many people work very, very hard at perfecting things intended…