Sam Sacks
@ssacks.bsky.social
Fiction critic at the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/news/author/sam-sacks); editor at Open Letters Review, formerly Open Letters Monthly (https://openlettersreview.com/) sam_sacks [at] hotmail
I did not like those previous books, I found them incredibly deterministic. This one felt more, I don't know, ethnological somehow, though the themes are the same. Has a touch of real tragedy. The extreme style is effective but it does court self-parody, a little like the 1980s minimalists.
November 10, 2025 at 11:06 PM
I did not like those previous books, I found them incredibly deterministic. This one felt more, I don't know, ethnological somehow, though the themes are the same. Has a touch of real tragedy. The extreme style is effective but it does court self-parody, a little like the 1980s minimalists.
Reposted by Sam Sacks
☝️Includes Jules Renard trying a banana for the first time, Ivan Turgenev not being able to get it up, Oswald Mosley “stretching the cock over three generations” and Samuel Pepys shitting in a chimney (twice). Yes I am a man of simple appetites.
November 9, 2025 at 9:53 AM
☝️Includes Jules Renard trying a banana for the first time, Ivan Turgenev not being able to get it up, Oswald Mosley “stretching the cock over three generations” and Samuel Pepys shitting in a chimney (twice). Yes I am a man of simple appetites.
Yes, it’s fine to do that (doing so will make Stalingrad almost unnecessary, but that’s ok).
November 8, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Yes, it’s fine to do that (doing so will make Stalingrad almost unnecessary, but that’s ok).
I can see that being extremely calming, somehow
November 7, 2025 at 2:55 AM
I can see that being extremely calming, somehow
Reading inspired by Nathan Kernan's biography of Schuyler and, more proximately, Langdon Hammer's terrific review of it www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Alert to Reality | Langdon Hammer
The first biography of James Schuyler suggests that his tendency to withdraw was both a harbinger of his disabling mood disorder and the wellspring of his shimmering poetry.
www.nybooks.com
November 7, 2025 at 2:54 AM
Reading inspired by Nathan Kernan's biography of Schuyler and, more proximately, Langdon Hammer's terrific review of it www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
And he had a 700-page book about the French and Indian War in 2023 and a (really good) 400-page book about fracking not long before that!
November 5, 2025 at 4:25 PM
And he had a 700-page book about the French and Indian War in 2023 and a (really good) 400-page book about fracking not long before that!