A weekly appreciation for the art of the review.

Only recently discovered by the Bolaño estate among his papers, The Third Reich bears many of the hallmarks of the now familiar Bolaño style: a pervasive sense of paranoia and generalized anxiety; a tone at once playful and dead serious; a setting rendered tangible through the almost overwhelming deployment of plausible detail—and simultaneously overlapping a hallucinatory, fantastic realm.

– Sohrab Ahmari of The New Republic talks a little Bolaño. 

“Still, in his new book, Dyer admits that undertaking an expansive, linear summation of a Russian art film, scene by scene, flirts with madness.”

– Chris Barton at the Los Angeles Times on Geoff Dyer’s Zona. 

 And this is the book’s most enduring reward: the subtle solace that Eli finds by the end of the book.

-Julia Jackson on Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen at Electric Literature. 

How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse.

– Pete Wells reviews Shake Shack for The New York Times.  We think he liked it.  Or maybe he didn’t?

Following in the vein of such personal musical heroes as Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, and Disco Inferno, brothers Chris and Richard Adams, plus a continually rotating group of supporting players, went from a pleasant if sometimes derivative start– in their case including numerous short, sometimes fragmentary lo-fi tape experiments and rushed songs that were very early-1990s indie– to a different place, a blend of something modern and timeless, suffused with an apparent serenity that in reality was never entirely at ease with the rest of the universe.

– Ned Raggett looks at Hood’s Recollected box set at Pitchfork.

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