A “Quiet Moral Authority”: A Review of Simon Critchley’s “Notes on Suicide”

Common sense tells us not to expect too much in the way of overarching thesis from any work entitled ‘Notes on’ this or that. When the subject at hand is suicide, so much the better: the very last thing the world needs is yet more didacticism on this question. The major religions have those bases covered, for better or worse. Notes on Suicide, the latest work by the philosopher Simon Critchley, is a duly open-minded meander across some well-trodden terrain, […]

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Composite Narratives and Last Words: A Review of Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy Knopf; 208 p. In a 1996 interview with KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, David Foster Wallace explained the dizzyingly broad sweet of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, in terms of a culture-overload that was singularly specific to late capitalism: ‘it seems to me that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming in and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to […]

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