The Cordial Horrors of Rachel Ingalls’s “Friends in the Country”

In the lead-up to the release of his film Get Out, Jordan Peele curated a series of films at BAM titled “The Art of the Social Thriller.” In recent years, the unsettling fiction of Robert Aickman has received a heightened prominence, including work that depends on a heightened sense of wrongness in terms of social interactions between characters. (It’s telling that his recently-reissued novel The Late Breakfasters feels like something written by a bizarro-world Evelyn Waugh.) The idea of a […]

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Morning Bites: Brideshead vs. Downton, n+1 Personals profiled, Stephen Elliott’s “Cherry,” and more

Brideshead Revisited Vs. Downton Abbey in a really bloody battle at Page Views. N+1 Personals gets profiled by New York magazine. Have you seen the preview for Stephen Elliott’s Cherry? Now Salman Rushdie thinks the whole assassination attempt on his life thing was B.S. Luc Sante on Patti Smith.  Again, we repeat: Luc Sante on Patti Smith at the New York Review of Books. Cooking with Sonic Youth (before Kim and Thurston broke up) and Evan Dando at Flavorwire. Follow Vol. 1 […]

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Waugh Waugh Waugh

“Language, survives, and another thing. I don’t know why Waugh’s cast of largely unlovable characters compels me so; they are snobbish and emotionally bankrupt, unkind to one another and alienating in their privilege. But there is an obscure something in Waugh’s elegant prose that makes it greater than itself, something that breathes a real and honest sentiment into his flawed flock.” (Via The Millions)

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