“Write while lying in bed,” I tell my creative-writing students. I am trying to get their attention, sure, and the suggestion carries a rebellious flair.
What I know that they don’t yet is that the weight of the work we have to do as artists, in a world in which time is money, can press so heavily upon us that, well, we need to lie down sometimes.
Scott Guild’s debut novel, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a postapocalyptic world populated by plastic figurines, dominated by inescapable advertising, in thrall to virtual reality and fearful of increasing acts of eco-terrorism as well as government clampdowns.
Scott Guild’s first solo album, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a postapocalyptic world populated by plastic figurines, well, you get the point.
First, I think we need to get Barbenheimer out of the way. I very much doubt that Scott Guild intended Plastic, his debut novel about life-sized plastic figurines and the nuclear Armageddon that threatens them, to come so close on the heels of Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s films. It’s a fascinating accident, though: while Plastic is a far more fantastic narrative, it’s drawing from some of the same cultural concerns that fueled the films and the discourse around them. Alongside the novel’s inventive and humorous imagery, Plastic is deeply invested in questions of authenticity in the face of commercialized social pressures, and in the burden of responsibility—at individual and planetary scales—within that society. Also, there are dance numbers.
At once a book for adults that's full of elements that make it feel like a fantasy YA novel, a story about survival and danger that starts with a group of dead kids and only gets weirder from there, and a narrative that shows a mighty writer with a unique voice at the height of her powers, The Book of Love is, simply put, a magical, confusing, heartfelt, strange, wonderfully written novel that delivers everything fans of Link's short fiction expected while also packing a few surprises.
While Archive reads principally as a psychological novel (rather than a capitalist critique), the book is permeated by Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism—the notion that we’re so overwhelmingly engulfed by our capitalist reality that we can no longer imagine alternative ways of living. This is certainly the case for the narrator, who is so immersed in his archival work that he continues half a decade after his dismissal. Any questions about his task have been quelled by the capitalist status quo; productivism reigns supreme.
Women’s stories and the significance of their interior lives are too often dismissed as narcissistic navel gazing. In My Brilliant Sister, Brown, like Franklin, like many other peers and predecessors, celebrates the kind of egotism that allows women to see themselves as significant, and their stories – creative, domestic and otherwise – as worthwhile.