David duchovny keeps distracting me. “Hey, look at those amazing things.” He’s pointing out toward the horizon where people appear to hover above the ocean on what a later Google search reveals to be electric surfboards. “They’re like fucking magic carpets.”
It’s mid-morning in Malibu, and I’m here to talk to Duchovny about his fifth book in only a handful of years, The Reservoir. Written from his old apartment overlooking Central Park, the pandemic-era story mirrors Thomas Mann’s own feverish novella, Death in Venice. Yet sitting down with Duchovny on the porch of Soho House, the Pacific fussing just a few feet away, all I can think about is California. Having flown in from New York City the night before, I’m still rather awestruck by our surroundings — the dramatic canyons and violent surf, shameless beaches called Billionaire’s and Dume — but Duchovny is perfectly at ease. He’s looking fit, tan, and, at 61, finally showing some gray, which suits him.
Tarantino has been thinking about writing “Cinema Speculation” for years, The book evolved, he says, from being a mere appreciation of his favorites to a survey of films that inspired a “point of view worth talking about.”
“Doing this made me respect the professionals of film criticism even more for the simple fact that I realized I couldn’t do what they do,” Tarantino says. “If my job was to go and watch the new movies every week and then write what I thought, I can’t imagine I would have anything to say about everything, other than offer a plot summary and a ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘indifferent’ verdict. With the book, I wanted to find something quirky that’s interesting and worth talking about.”
It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a fan. For devotees of mega-franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s never been a more massive glut of new content. We’re living through a golden age of interconnected storytelling, as sequels and prequels explode across film, television, and literature faster than many of us can keep up. Yet at the same time, these mega-franchises are tormented by their most strident fans, melting down into paroxysms of toxicity through petitions, review bombing, and targeted harassment campaigns, among other odious tactics. Toxic fandom is a complex beast, but at the root of its many convulsions, there’s often one sore spot: the sticky concept of canon.
New fans of these universe-hopping stories are seeing some of the challenges that come with infinite options and rebootability: meaning itself grows tenuous when the narrative has no limits.
Aime Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait with Nothing takes a different approach to these problems, focusing on the psychological problem of the multiverse, even as it uses actual alternate realities as a haunting plot device.
Erika T. Wurth's White Horse belongs to the new wave of horror fiction that delivers the creepiness and darkness readers have always associated with the genre, while also packing plenty of social commentary.
Also — and perhaps more importantly — White Horse is a horror novel that subverts one of the elements at the core of the genre from the beginning: Instead of the writer being someone who is afraid of the other, the writer is the other.
In the novels of highly decorated Australian author Alex Miller, the discovery of a journal or letter will often spark an unexpected, life-affirming journey. The two-time Miles Franklin award winner is a master of capturing that pivotal moment, when the tides that push our lives here or there, change. New pathways open, new friendships form and the future transforms. Following a spate of nonfiction works – 2020’s Max, and 2017’s autobiographical The Passage of Love – Miller’s new novel A Brief Affair returns to some of the themes and characters we are familiar with from his well-known books such as The Ancestor Game or Journey to the Stone Country.