My Year

2025 In Review

I am a very slow reader and, as it turns out, a pretty slow writer. I was going to do a whole multi-part thing, tracking my 2025 in books, in songs, in movies, and in pieces published. That was back at the beginning of December, and until now I have not written word one. Because who cares, really? See: the name of this blog. See also: everything else.

Yet 2025 was, despite or perhaps because of everything, a pretty good year for me. It was the best year for new movies since before the pandemic, and it produced some actually good pop music. It gave me the time and the excuse to read and re-read several masterpieces. And it included the improbably publication of some thirty-eight pieces, including several very long and long-in-the-works essays, as well as three pieces of fiction. I also wrote approximately 51,000 words of a new novel, and put out a (qualified) manifesto against our era of lowered standards, and hosted the latest (and perhaps the last) installment of the Interval Reading Series, and got a chance to read a bit of my own work in the backroom of a bar in Bushwick, thanks to Rhian Sasseen.

Because I am lazy, and because it would be boring, I’m not going into detail on all that. You have better ways to spend your time; you could be watching Marty Supreme. So please, accept this sample of my year. I’ll be seeing you in the next, if the fates allow.

First, the nonfiction.

I have struggled for the course of my adult life to make some sort of a living through my writing. I have worked retail jobs, I have been an assistant, I have gone back to school, I’ve even left the country; and somehow, still, I keep doing it. This was, hands-down, the best year I have ever had as a professional writer. I published essays and reviews, I wrote about politics and art, I revealed a bit about my life, and for the first time in five full years I published some fiction. For the first time, I don’t feel comfortable sharing everything I wrote; there’s simply too much of it. Let’s stick to the highlights. Somehow, I’ve more than a few.

• Liberties published my very long (6000+ word) essay on the life and work of Yasunari Kabawata in their Fall 2025 issue. I wrote my first draft of this piece all the way back in the summer of 2023, when it was to be a (much, much shorter) review of Kawabata’s then-newly-translated The Rainbow. But there was simply too much there, and so the review broke its banks, and flooded out towards its present form. Of course, that was only the start, and over the past two years it grew to include a bit of Elizabeth Hardwick, an exploration of the literary influence of the great Kantō Earthquake, and more than a bit of my own personal history, from the day I found a remaindered copy of Snow Country on the shelves of a bankrupted Melbourne bookstore, to a night spent drinking in the mountains west of Hiroshima, and on through the past decade of reading and living. I was and remain immensely proud of this essay, and grateful to Celeste Marcus and Leon for publishing it. If you click one link in this whole post, please click this one.

• Speaking of Liberties, I wrote a number of essays for their online Sidebar series, including this piece on Jenn Pelly’s Mood Machine and right-wing slop, and an extended elaboration on vision and racecraft in RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys.

• Back in March, I wrote a New York Times Magazine piece about Netflix and its insatiable appetite for world culture. As I wrote then: “Thanks to the scale of Netflix’s viewership and its surveillance trove of subscriber data, the company is starting to centralize the world’s moving images under a single umbrella; it is creating a platform where everything has to stream together well, playing to everyone everywhere.” Sound familiar?

• I have never felt entirely secure in my professional standing, which in earlier days produced writing that hewed towards expectation. But as others often tell me, there is freedom in freelancing; if you aren’t locked into a role, then you can be fluid, you can swell and expand. So I tried to take more risks this year, using recent releases as an excuse to pursue my own pet projects. A review of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Things That Disappear became an extended meditation on ruination; the recent restoration of Fall of Otrar allowed a few thoughts on the weird imagination of the past; I wrote about cops and robbers and white supremacists w/r/t the Den of Thieves franchise; and I launched an assault on billionaire space dreams, with some help from Pip Adam’s Audition. A million thanks to my editors for proving so willing to flow along with me.

• Speaking of great editors. After a bafflingly long limbo, the genius Brandy Jensen is editing again, and at Defector to boot. She let me write about the strange mediocrity of Netflix action movies; Kelly Reichardt’s visions of labor; and why Kiyoshi Kurosawa scares me so goddamned much. A great editor gives you a chance to give form to your intuitions by helping them to the surface as words, and Brandy remains one of the best working.

• I wrote a bit about visual art this year, starting with the Met’s astonishing Caspar David Friedrich exhibition. I also started contributing to the venerable Apollo Magazine, including reviews of a retrospective of the video artist Stan Douglas, and Keita Morimoto’s first major American gallery show.

• If you read a piece of mine this year, it was probably this group review of ‘male novelists’ that I did for Vulture, because this is apparently something we feel we need to care about. This one started off as something very different—a discussion of how (many of) these writers funnel their anxieties about the general decline of literacy and thus the place of literature in society into a particular set of convenient masculine grievances—but over many rounds of edits it became more of a straight one-after-another review, more focused on the particular ‘male’ content of these novels than any particular literary form. It got some attention, Jordan Castro quoted it sarcastically, a group of VC-backed LA writers spent the better part of two days calling me a homo retard, and we did it all again one month later. I’ve siphoned some of that lost material off into future essays, but I wish more of it had stayed in, as it would have sharpened the overall critique. Of the writers discussed, only Sebastian Castillo and Tony Tulathimutte seem to care about making art. Everyone else is too concerned with content, and thus with representation, so their writing remains essentially fixed in the mind of the writer, and has no life of its own. This is as true for the stylist Castro, who consistently mistakes surfaces for depths, as for the self-consciously lazy Rienspects, who seems to genuinely believe that he is transcribing real life directly onto the page, as for Barkan, who cares more about what these novels depict than what they reveal. That’s bad for the novels under discussion, as it prevents them from ever transcending the intentions of their authors. But it’s bad for literature in general, prioritizing ease-of-consumption and consistency-of-comprehension over the more expansive and more open-ended concerns of real fiction. A work of literary art must surpass itself or create the conditions for a reader to do so. If other men are so worried that their books will matter, they should care less about their status as men, and try, for once, to think about themselves as writers. Good luck with that.

Next, the fiction.

I published three pieces of fiction this year, sourced from two novels. The Los Angeles Review of Books published an edited excerpt of the opening chapters of To the Madhouse in their Fall issue, and the good people at the Cleveland Review of Books published an extract from the middle. Back in September, I also published a bit of a novel-in-progress that I’m calling The Searchers at the indispensable Minor Literature[s]. Read on for drunken nights, literary parties, talking birds, old stones, lonely mornings, and plentiful mystery.

Then, the books.

For the past two years I have kept a google doc of everything I read, in whole or in part. For perhaps the first time, a good chunk (maybe thirty-five percent) was for work, and some of the best books I read this year were for review. Yūko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome cracks open the novel of historical trauma. Donald Niedekker’s Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost imagines how one might write a geologic novel, a shamanic novel, and an imperial novel, all at once. Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise yearns to escape modernity, but can’t find a way out. I was not entirely convinced by Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life, but only because Castillo is so plainly and magnificently talented; his next one will be even better. I tried to sketch out the cartoonist Joe Sacco’s illustrated humanism. I was seriously moved by Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional; more on her soon. And my whole year has been haunted by Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, a work of spectral history that also gave me a chance to finally read her magisterial Human Acts.

• I devote every summer to closing my literary gaps, tackling one or two major books that I have not yet had time to read. If I came off a bit cranky, writing about all those Man Books, it was because they were distracting me from José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, a book that has, I think, permanently rewired my artistic outlook. I have always preferred my works of art to be capacious and open; I want them to let the world in, and remake it. You can do this narratively, dramatically bringing various elements, themes, subjects, ideas, etc into relation, and you can do it formally, via the structure of the fictive world you create. Donoso does both, writing a novel about mutability and transformation that is itself always transforming into something else—a godlike meeting of form and material that repeatedly and fundamentally reconfigures the nature of the reality it creates. This regeneration exists on so many simultaneous and sequential levels—as superstition, as deception, as family myth and literary creation and and and—that you lose yourself in the mirrors and repetitions, and emerge yourself remade. After that, why ask for less?

• I had tried several times to make my way through Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, but there are books which desire their particular moment. Every year for five years I opened The Sound and the Fury, before I finally sprinted through it on a bus traveling south through Andalusia. So it was with Volcano, which I struggled to cross until, all at once, I gave myself up and let the language flow through me. Lowry himself seems to have been a real bastard, self-aggrandizing and incapable of true self-knowledge. Yet he knows the Consul, and he understands how any given person’s given world is constructed from a mystic mental map of grudges, fears, evasions, and temptations, reconfigured and reconceived as an incoherent yet somehow interlocking network of symbols, quotations, and forces human, natural, and (potentially) divine. All this amid a fantasia of alcoholic flow states and more than a tad too much phonetic dialogue. You couldn’t write this today, and, in places, you shouldn’t. But it makes sense to me that Lowry had to rewrite this novel so many times, packing so much of his own life onto a skeleton of numerological semi-significance. No one writes a book like this by accident, and very few on purpose. To aspire towards it would be, almost certainly, to fail. That alone is worthwhile.

• When I’m working on a novel, I try to read around it, to see how others have handled similar subject matter. This is research, kind of, a way of surveying the options and solutions available. Because I’m writing about people having a good time abroad, and then a very bad time, I had to read Volcano. And because I’m writing about people falling in and out of love overseas, I started the year with Shirley Hazzard’s The Year of the Holiday. I love Hazzard, the way her prose slices diagonally through the indifference and the superficiality of the social world, and I wish that she had written more. Holiday is her first novel, and the last of hers that I had left to read, and like all of her books, it is ultimately about an individual arriving suddenly inside a moment of unbearable significance. Like Bowen, and like James, Hazzard writes her characters as fundamentally helpless, swept along by the inexplicable and unavoidable currents of love, and just as suddenly cast ashore. The novel’s closing image, of a night train filling up with young soldiers, has stuck with me throughout the year; it is life, trapped in a moment.

• Whenever I found myself at a loss this year, I would pull down something by John Berger, and be renewed. If I could model my career after any writer, I would probably pick Vivian Gornick. If I could could pick two, they’d be Gornick and Berger. He might have been a Marxist, a polemicist, a public figure and, occasionally, a crank, but Berger was above all things an artist, which made him into a humanist. He pays attention to people, he communicates, and he sympathizes, without that sentimental turn away from the hard edges of the world. The communal bliss that crowns To the Wedding is shaped by hard hands, the rough-hewn culmination of love and labor and the intimate knowledge a body, a kitchen, a village which is a landscape. And it transpires in the shadow of illness, affirming both the inevitability of a long slow degeneration and the strict, stubborn persistence of love through all tragedy, all decline. Photocopies is more diffuse, a series of companionable portraits standing against the centralizing, atomizing indifference of modern life. He was a metaphysical materialist, and there are so few today still like him.

• I finished my year with two (well, five) books that push against the limits of narrative reality. Following my first true read-through of Borges’s The Aleph (I’d read most of the stories patchwork, but never together), I finally completed Julio Cortazar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories. I had read a few of these stories before (“Axolotls” and “The Night Face Up” recurred frequently in grad school) but never in conversation with one another. If Borges is often writing about one thing which is really another in microcosm, Cortazar deals in simultaneities. The metaphor of the Tiger is never entirely reducible to the wandering threat of the Kid; the man on the motorcycle dreams of the Aztec flower war at the same time that the sacrificial captive dreams of him. Cortazar found many ways to disrupt the sequential nature of narrative, where words follow one another to construct sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc. See: the reader-driven randomness of Hopscotch. Yet I appreciate how, in these stories, he sustains that thematic tension without fracturing it formally, allowing the pressure to build within a reader’s mind and never quite releasing it. I am similarly impressed by the nooks and crannies that Solvej Balle finds within her On the Calculation of Volume novels, compressing multiple potential lives into the space of a single constrained day. Sometimes I do find myself wishing that they would surprise me more until, all at once, they do, opening up a hole in the world the size of a Roman coin. I am midway through Volume III, and hope to get there by the end of the year.

• A number of my fantastic friends and peers published long-simmering projects this year, and I wouldn’t want to leave them off before I close things out. I read early pages of Laura Venita Green’s Sister Creatures all the way back in 2019 during my first MFA workshop, and it was a thrill like no other to see the book being read out in the world. I’ve been hearing about Celeste Marcus’s Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession and a Dramatic Life in Art and Morten Høi Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain for almost as long, and then both came out back-to-back. My friend Kat Tang’s debut novel Five Star Stranger came out in paperback, as well as first novels from the mega-talented Stephanie Wambugu (Lonely Crowds), Grace Byron (Herculine) and Cora Lewis (Information Age), all of whom I had the privilege of hosting at past Interval readings.

  

2025, in closing.

I have worked for much of my life to make a life in the arts among such talented, devoted, committed people. We live in mean and ugly times. This world is full of bullshit, and it will always be. The miracle of real art resides in how thoroughly it destabilizes and dematerializes that persistent bullshit. Never take beauty for granted. Just because we are suffused with it does not mean we have enough.

Farewell to bad times and bad moods and especially to bad art. Happy New Year, and travel in grace. xxx