My Articles 

Literature is full of characters who discover that being loved and being understood are not the same thing. Some spend their lives standing at the edge of their own family's narrative, present but unseen. They are spoken to but not listened to. Remembered, but not considered. Included in the language of belonging yet excluded from its practice. Perhaps that is why certain characters remain with us long after we close their books. Among them, Ivan Ilyich has always lingered

Yesterday was International Reading Day. I thought about it for a while and realized that I had a problem. I have never had a reading year that felt so fragmented. When the year began, I was reading philosophy. Considering it was my birth month, that was perhaps an unusually gloomy way to celebrate being alive. Yet it made sense. Over the last few years, my reading has increasingly shifted toward philosophy, politics and history. Somewhere along the way, those three areas qui

There is something quietly unsettling about opening David Markson’s Collected Poems. Not because the poems are obscure in any fashionable or performative way, but because they seem to have already abandoned the expectation that they should make themselves legible to you. They do not unfold. They sit there, almost indifferent, like objects recovered from a mind that has stopped negotiating with clarity. Even the foreword admits, with a kind of shrug, that some of these poems a