Christian Lorentzen

The wild​, dark and very funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’...

Gerald Murnane​ was named after a racehorse. His father, Reginald, was a front man for Teddy Estershank, a professional punter who was banned from being a licensed trainer or registered owner of horses by racecourses around Melbourne. Estershank, an ‘evil genius’ according to Murnane, used friends like Reginald as dummy owners for the horses he bought, trained and bet on. The...

How many​ living novelists does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of...

Most​ bank robberies in the US are accomplished with a simple demand note. That was the way my great-uncle Bobby went about it when he robbed a Boston bank in 1952. He was wearing a mask but somebody saw the getaway car, and he was soon arrested because he’d parked it right outside his house. The $1200 in cash he’d stolen was stashed in the washing machine. He was 25 years old...

Several factors​ contribute to the innocuousness of Ali Smith’s current project. She’s now published two novels of her projected ‘Seasonal Quartet’: Autumn, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Winter. These books don’t share characters or continuity but constitute a rapid-response literary gloss on the Brexit crisis. Within the fictional United Kingdom of...