Both Flesh and Not: Essays

Amidst the tone of graven importance the writers of these essays, maybe there’s not much to say that feels new—or if there is, we are often side-stepping it. In her book Hole Studies , Hilary Plum points out how contemporary essayists, she says, write “I’ve been thinking a lot about . . .” and “then just virtuously mention a subject, not saying one... See more

Suddenly, the potential for fiction as a vital force in the world felt unlimited. It could be everything: the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised, a powerful form of entertainment, in the highest sense of that word. I suppose part of me had been wondering if the short story was going to be enough—enough for my grandiose a

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I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall r... See more

There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research pap... See more