I launched my literary magazine last week. Here it is! My almost relative just made us some lovely art so it looks higher grade now. I hope you will read some of the writing. I am against party reports so I will say nothing about the launch except that it was very crowded and very nice and I almost froze to death.
A very fashionable writer just published a longform essay about Émile Zola in a very fashionable literary magazine. The actual dissection of Zola’s canon, a cycle called Les Rougon-Macquart, is the most interesting aspect of the essay, even if you disagree with some of his conclusions. But it feels secondary in the piece to his diagnosis of the contemporary novel, an evergreen and endlessly recyclable source of complaint for a few thousand words. This diagnosis is familiar. The contemporary realist novel has become debilitatingly embroiled in identitarianism. Novelists cannot imagine their way out of the structures by which they feel oppressed or beaten down. If they could t…