Mark O'Connell

The Case Against Reason: Curtis White argues that science isn’t the only way of looking at the world.

markoconnell — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:45:33 +0000

When Richard Dawkins was named the world’s “Top Thinker” in a poll recently published by Prospect magazine, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the world—or at least that part of it that votes in such polls—must have an impoverished sense of what constitutes a vital or transformative intellectual figure. Any list of “thinkers” that doesn’t feature …

TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann

markoconnell — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:40:01 +0000

It’s probably about time we agreed to give Colum McCann his own eponymous adjective. It would make sense, at any rate, to refer to a particular kind of audacious fictional gesture as “McCannian”. In his last book, the hugely successful Let the Great World Spin, a cluster of fictions were tied together by the sublime spectacle of …

Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: A Necessarily Ill-Informed Argument for Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth as the Funniest Book Ever Written

markoconnell — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:37:19 +0000

I would dearly love to be able to start this piece by saying that The Poor Mouth is the funniest book ever written. It’d be a real lapel-grabber, for one thing, an opening gambit the casual Millions reader would find it hard to walk away from. And for all I know, it might well be true to say such …

Interview at The Rumpus

markoconnell — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:51:24 +0000

Lauren Eggert-Crowe interviewed me for The Rumpus about my ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. You can read it here.

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by James Lasdun

markoconnell — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:03:06 +0000

In 2003, English writer James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop at a college in New York City. The star of the workshop was a woman in her 30s he calls “Nasreen”, who was working on a novel based on her family’s experiences in pre-revolutionary Iran. “There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop …

The Soft Bulletins: The Rise of the Whispering YouTube Video

markoconnell — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:26:06 +0000

We open with a close-up of a young woman’s face, shot from below. She gazes downward into the camera, her light brown hair hanging so low as to almost touch the lens. Her eyes are wide with what seems a kind of maternal solicitousness. When she speaks, she does so very quietly and softly, with …

Review: How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields

markoconnell — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:34:49 +0000

When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his taking seriously of literature. There’s a striking moment in the closing pages of his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” when he tells us that …

Missing Out, by Adam Phillips

markoconnell — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:16:32 +0000

My wife, who is pregnant with our first child, had her three-month sonogram in early September. Right after the scan was finished, I had to run out of the hospital and down the street to where we’d parked our car about an hour and a quarter earlier. We’d only had enough loose change to pay …

Was Amanda McKittrick Ros the Worst Novelist in History?

markoconnell — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:03:30 +0000

An extract at Slate from my ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever ——— Who was the worst novelist in history? A definitive answer is probably impossible, given that total artistic failure traditionally results in total obscurity. But it would be foolish to even consider the question …

Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace

markoconnell — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:45:48 +0000

There’s an aspect of the David Foster Wallace nonfiction reading experience that hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been much remarked upon. To read his essays, reviews and articles is (for me at least) to feel a kind of retrospective anxiety on behalf of the unknown editors who commissioned them in the first place. For instance, one of …