2025: A Roundup
Favorites of the Year, Wrap-Up on Articles, + full reading list
Stuff I Wrote:
(big thank yous to Rob Latham, Annie Berke, and Michel Pridmore-Brown at LARB and Aaron Schuster at e-flux for the edits/insight/time over the past year!)
12 Jan 2025:
“The Lost Utopia” | LA Review of Books
On Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest, utopia, ideology, and salvaging what’s redeemable from lost/romantic causes. I technically wrote this toward the end of 2024 but in hindsight it’s probably my favorite piece that ran this year.
5 April 2025:
“Toward an Aesthetic of Post-Boomer Fiction” | LA Review of Books
Essay/review of Adam Kelly’s New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age + some extended treatment of the weak/blindspots in the manifesto David Foster Wallace laid out for the direction he hoped to push American fiction heading into the 21st century -- long story short, every author he was mad at from the 70’s was already doing what he wanted them to do by the time DFW was in college. Fun one to work on + loved the opportunity to do some public axe grinding against a personal bête noir
2 September 2025:
“A Higher Thing than History” | LA Review of Books
Career retrospective on American historiographer Hayden White + a review of White’s final (posthumous) collection of essays, The Ethics of Narrative, read against his earlier/most widely read book, Metahistory.
3 September 2025:
“Review of Gilles Deleuze, On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981” | e-flux
Review of the University of Minnesota’s recently published edition of Charles Stivale’s translation of the transcript to Gilles Deleuze’s seminar on painting delivered at the University of Vincennes-St. Denis in 1981. Includes some background on Deleuze’s approach to teaching and his reputation as a lecturer (mainly sourced from Francois Dosse’s wonderful joint-biography of Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Intersecting Lives) and introduces some of the ideas that GD developed during the lecture that didn’t appear in his monograph on Francis Bacon (The Logic of Sensation) from the same year.
Loved working on this and can’t say enough good things about the book (or Deleuze’s teaching transcripts in general, which are available in full through the University of Purdue’s Deleuze Seminars Project -- seriously…pick a topic and jump in, you can’t go wrong).
(@editors, I have a review copy of the Stivale’s book on Deleuze’s teaching career that I’d love to write up -- don’t hesitate to reach out if this is something you’d be interested in running)
11 September 2025:
“The Enemy of Aggression” | LA Review of Books
Review of the first two (along with a nod toward the forthcoming third) installments of Michel Serres’s five-volume Hermes series, originally published between the 60’s and 70’s, which the University of Minnesota began to roll out in English for the first time (in full) in 2024 (translations by Louise Burchill & Randolph Burks).
14 December 2025
“Still Got It” | LA Review of Books
An extended response to the tendency to read late/last work by aging writers by prioritizing the question of whether or not they’ve “still got it”. I’d wanted to do something along these lines for after realizing exactly how many authors from the 60’s/70’s metafiction cohort continued to work into their 80’s and 90’s after Hayden White’s (brilliant) final lecture, “Is My Life a Story” and a handful of John Barth’s later essays and short stories back in the spring. The release of Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket back in October gave me a timely excuse to jump in. Got quite a bit of good feedback on this piece and I’m happy with it, but this one was hard…introducing a wide swath of ignored/unread work by a large group of writers while working wasn’t easy -- juggling that while also working through theoretical backing and including examples of the types of mis-readings that I hoped to correct, all in a reasonably brief space was even harder. A second (huge!) thank you to Rob Latham for the editorial insight on this one.
Stuff I Read:
[Full 2025 list (in roughly approximate order) below]:
In no particular order…
Top (10 Fiction):
The Corner that Held Them - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Conjugating Hindi - Ishmael Reed
A History Maker - Alasdair Gray
Weymouth Sands - John Cowper Powys
Border Country - Raymond Williams
The Loop - Jacques Roubaud
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1 - Peter Weiss
Vivienne: A Novel - Emmalea Russo
Mrs. Ted Bliss - Stanley Elkin
A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James
Top Ten (Philosophy/Theory):
The Five Senses - Michel Serres
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza - Gilles Deleuze
Philosophical Essays - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Marxism and Form - Fredric Jameson
At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to AI - Andrea Pinotti
Michel Serres: Figures of Thought - Christopher Watkin
Laruelle: Against the Digital - Alexander Galloway
Rabelais and His World: A New Translation - Sergeiy Sandler
History and Class Consciousness - Georg Lukacs
Eros and Civilization - Herbert Marcuse
Top 10 (Everything Else):
The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda - Ishmael Reed
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist - Liz Pelly
The Age of Revolution - Eric Hobsbawm
The History of the French Revolution - Jules Michelet
Witness Against the Beast - E.P. Thompson
The Odyssey (trans. Daniel Mendelson) - Homer/Mendelsohn
Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self Branding Transform Creative Culture
Marat/Sade - Peter Weiss
Autobiography - John Cowper Powys
Bento’s Sketchbook - John Berger
Full(ish) List:
January:
Rene Descartes -- Meditations on First Philosophy
Aidan Higgins -- Balcony of Europe
Susan Sontag -- On Photography
Alasdair Gray -- Lanark
Alasdair Gray -- 1982 Janine
Roland Barthes -- The Pleasure of the Text
JF Lyotard -- The Postmodern Condition
Colette Shade -- Y2K: How the 2000’s Became Everything
John Cowper Powys -- Wolf Solent
Alasdair Gray -- Poor Things
February
William Carlos Williams -- White Mule
Raymond Williams -- Border Country
Eric Hobsbawm -- The Age of Revolution
Douglas Mao -- Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production
Liz Pelly -- Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
March:
Stephanie La Cava -- I Fear My Pain Interests You
Fredric Jameson -- Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Adam Kelly -- New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age
Pierre Bourdieu -- The Field of Cultural Production
Fredric Jameson -- Signatures of the Visible
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno -- Dialectic of Enlightenment
April:
Benjamin Bergholtz -- Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel
Peter Weiss -- The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1
Dambudzo Marechera -- The House of Hunger
Fredric Jameson -- Mimesis, Expression, Construction
Michel Serres -- Hermes II: Interference
May:
Marlon James -- A Brief History of Seven Killings
Alasdair Gray -- The Fall of Kelvin Walker
Jacques Roubaud -- Hortense is Abducted
Fredric Jameson -- The Geopolitical Aesthetic
Emmalea Russo -- Vivienne: A Novel
Ed Park -- Same Bed Different Dreams
Jacques Roubaud -- The Great Fire of London
Fredric Jameson -- Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality
Kim Wheatley -- John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism
Jacques Roubaud -- The Loop
June:
Jules Michelet -- The History of the French Revolution
Christopher Watkin -- Michel Serres: Figures of Thought
Hayden White -- Metahistory
Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner (eds) -- Re-Figuring Hayden White
E.P. Thompson -- Witness Against the Beast
Frank Kermode -- The Sense of an Ending
Hayden White -- The Ethics of Narrative, Volume 2
July:
William Blake -- America: A Prophecy
Dante/Alasdair Gray -- Hell (Inferno)
Dante/Alasdair Gray -- Purgatory
Gilles Deleuze -- On Painting
Homer/Daniel Mendelsohn -- The Odyssey
Helene Besette -- Lili is Crying
G.W. Leibniz -- Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays
Michel Serres/Bruno Latour -- Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time
Michel Serres -- Hermes I: Communication
August:
Patricia Curd (ed) -- A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia
Plato -- The Symposium
Peter Weiss -- Marat/Sade
Michel Serres -- The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies
William Sharkespeare -- Coriolanus
John Cowper Powys -- Autobiography
Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass
Samuel Beckett -- Endgame
Michel Serres -- The Troubadour of Knowledge
Michel Serres -- Variations on the Body
Aiskhylos, Sophoclese, and Euripedes/Anne Carson -- An Oresteia
John Cowper Powys -- Weymouth Sands
William Shakespeare -- The Tempest
Thomas R. Parker -- Paranatures in Culinary Culture: An Alimentary Ecology
Robert Coover -- Open House
Michel Serres -- The Parasite
G.W. Leibniz -- Philosophical Essays
September:
Gilles Deleuze -- Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
Alexander Galloway -- Laruelle: Against the Digital
Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
Alasdair Gray -- A History Maker
Lucian -- Three Menippean Fantasies
Mayumi Inaba -- Mornings without Mii
Edward Said -- On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
Thomas Pynchon -- Shadow Ticket
Christine Brooke-Rose -- Life, End Of
Ishmael Reed -- The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda
Ishmael Reed -- Juice
October:
Mikhail Bakhtin/Sergeiy Sandler -- Rabelais and His World
Lucien Febvre -- The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais
Giorgio Agamben -- Nymphs
Peter Szendy -- The Powers of Reading
Benjamin Paloff -- Bakhtin’s Adventure
Andrea Pinotti -- At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality
John Berger -- Bento’s Sketchbook
John Berger -- Hold Everything Dear
Stanley Elkin -- Mrs. Ted Bliss
Ishmael Reed -- Conjugating Hindi
November:
William Gaddis -- Agape Agape
Leigh Claire La Berge -- Marx for Cats
Wiliam Marx -- Libraries of the Mind
John Cowper Powys -- In Defense of Sensuality
Aleksandr Prigozhin -- Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life
Sylvia Townsend Warner -- Summer Will Show
Francois Dosse -- History of Structuralism, Vol. 1: The Rising of the Sign
Sylvia Townsend Warner -- The Corner that Held Them
Philip E. Wegner -- Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The University, and the Desire for Narrative
Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff -- Your Name Here
December:
Sophie Bishop -- Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self Branding Transform Creative Culture
Jeremy Rosen -- Genre Bending
Fredric Jameson -- Marxism and Form
Herbert Marcuse -- Eros and Civilization
Georg Lukacs -- History and Glass Consciousness
Günther Anders -- The Obsolescence of the Human
Sylvia Townsend Warner -- After the Death of Don Juan
Giorgio Agamben -- The Body of Language: esperruquancluzelubelouzerirelu
Ishmael Reed -- Reckless Eyeballing*
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs -- Aesthetics and Politics*
John Cowper Powys -- Maiden Castle
Quinn Slobidian -- Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right
Magda Szabo -- The Door