Transcendence Has a Cost: On Tara Isabella Burton’s “Here In Avalon”

"Here In Avalon"

In October, I sat inside James Turrell’s installation Hind Sight for the first time. This is what it was like: I followed a railing along a winding pathway before arriving at a chair, where I sat. I then stared across the room at something imperceptible: something made out of light, something not designed to be perceived by human eyes under normal light. I left the room with a greater understanding of friends and family who have had genuinely religious experiences. In Hind Sight, there was the sense of perceiving something utterly ineffable and yet utterly present.

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Constant Delirium: Reading Jean-Pierre Martinet’s “With Their Hearts In Their Boots”

"With Their Hearts In Their Boots"
Credit where credit is due: I picked up Jean-Pierre Martinet’s With Their Hearts In Their Boots (translated by Alex Andriesse) in no small part due to the fact that its introduction was by William Boyle. Boyle’s cultural recommendations, whether literary or cinematic, are often spot-on, and reading his description of this “[h]hard-boiled, funny, dangerous” short novel piqued my interest for what was to follow.

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