Articles
This is a selective archive of reviews, features, and essays I’ve published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Esquire, Arena, etc. You can browse below in reverse-chronological order or read by category: general book reviews (e.g., DeLillo, Murakami, Mailer, Gibson, Saramago), heterogeneous essays, or reviews and other pieces on technology, language, music, or philosophy; and some interviews.
How did Bob Dylan write “Like a Rolling Stone”? The pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer wasn’t there, but he pretends to know anyway. Inspired by Dylan’s own description of “vomiting” forth the song’s lyrics, Lehrer peers inside the singer’s 1965 skull and announces confidently that the “right hemisphere” of Dylan’s brain was combining “scraps” or “fragments” of existing songs and poetry in a “mental blender”, before spitting out a set of “lyrics that make little literal sense”.
Haruki Murakami has always been a cult writer, if one can say that about a novelist who regularly sells millions, both in his native Japan and in translation. Well, 1Q84 — an epic romance in three “books” and two volumes — is his cult novel. In
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