Simon Taylor

Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel came out in 2005, a year after Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Where Bolaño’s work is full to the brim, Levrero’s is, writes Annie McDermott, his translator into English, empty–but empty to the brim. Mauro Libertello writes: If Roberto Bolaño showed us

I’d been invited to a screening in the internal courtyard at the back of the house rented by the friend who makes movies, short films. His attention was elsewhere when I arrived, since there were others there who were quite at home and on a table were bottles. I

This is the police mortuary, the tradesmen’s entrance to the Court, as it were. Here are delivered the raw materials of justice, corpses that are precipitates of strange experience, alloys of fear and hate and anger and love and viciousness and bewilderment, that the Court will take and refine

Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe write that the social order has been “entrusted to lawyers, activists, remote governmental experts on transnational commissions, central bankers, technocrats, the market, CEOs… not to ordinary citizens” and that how production functions, is organised and distributed is left to “supply chain managers, investors and trade negotiators,

in an excellently titled early section, “I hate myself and I want to buy,” quoting Hobsbawm: the “short twentieth century” “ended in a global disorder whose nature was unclear, and without an obvious mechanism for either ending it or keeping it under control.” This impotence was not, however, only due

Since you asked (my little joke), my writing is going a lot better, thank you, more smoothly. Foucault required of his writing style that it feel like velvet, that it have a velvet surface. This velvet-surfaced prose for some reason, perhaps because of the expression velvet-tongued, makes me think of