Justin St. Clair at the LARB:
IN THESE PROFOUNDLY unsettling times, literary criticism can seem a little frivolous. We’re no longer slouching toward some imagined autocratic future; we’re midway through the dissolution of the American experiment. We’ve got concentration camps and mass deportations, the senseless dismantlement of essential federal agencies, military personnel on foot patrol in our nation’s capital. There’s a relentless assault on public media, public education, public service, public health, and anything else that an earlier generation would have reasonably considered to be in the public’s interest. It’s dystopian and thoroughly demoralizing. And the most we can manage, it would seem, is to twiddle our thumbs like so many complicit functionaries, doomscrolling against the inevitable.
In this context, I don’t exactly know what to do with Jonathan Lethem’s latest. And I’m not entirely sure he did either. An anthology decades in the making, A Different Kind of Tension presents, in chronological order, 30 of Lethem’s best short stories, from “Walking the Moons” (1990) to “The Red Sun School of Thoughts” (2024). All, with the exception of the final piece, are available elsewhere, but the paucity of new material in no way diminishes the collection.
more here.
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