Month: August 2026
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Paradise Drowned
Behold my favorite shot: The camera is static. Eli Sunday emerges out of the bottom-right corner. His black figure blocks almost half of our view. On his left, a toxic pool of oil placidly parades as a bizarre facsimile of the sky, while the pipe discharging the thick fluid seems instead to spew out light…
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Cerveza (A story)
I “You know—I used to have a dog—before you came about—” The branches creaked under each of his floundering steps. He had once again lost his way and the plot, and, like an old horse mechanically returning home after forgetting where he was headed, launched into one his well-trod anecdotes. My ears were already splintering.…
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Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie is a bizarre book, obsessed with fashion, offering a clash between form and content. Naturalism always revels in a preposterous sense of essentialism and determinism. Case in point: Theodore Dreiser’s heroine has an atavistic instinct for shopping. In fact, the obtrusive narration of Sister Carrie keeps making osten-tedious arguments about women and fashion.…
