Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He holds a masters degree in the social sciences from the University of Chicago and has been a lecturer in the History and Philosophy Department of York College in Queens, New York. His fiction and criticism have appeared in such venues as The Baffler, Conjunctions, Dissent, and n+1 and may be found at his website. His translations of Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier are currently available from Readux Books. The Zero and the One, his first novel, is forthcoming from Twelve Books in March 2017. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.ryanruby.info
by Ryan Ruby Over the past four centuries, the novel, that most most broad-minded of all media, has asked us time and time again to contemplate the humanity of those who by virtue of their profession, their views, their proclivities, or their character count as some of the most despicable examples of our species. There…
by Ryan Ruby Taking its cue from French politics, French experimental writing has always been a clubby affair. Unlike in Britain or America, where economic and political liberalism have encouraged writers to view themselves as individual talents engaged in private agons with tradition, in France, with a few notable exceptions, avant-garde writers have presented themselves…
by Ryan Ruby This month, two minor controversies revived the specter of the “language wars” and reintroduced the literary internet to the distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. One began when Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize and readers took to their search engines en masse to look up the word “Kafkaesque,”…
A review of Dan Fox’s Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (Coffee House Press, 2016)