A Book Club For Reformed Nonfiction Supremacists

A failed murder, a final burst of unsent letters, and the suggestion that our hero doesn't resolve his arguments so much as stop needing to win them.

A manic academic, freshly dumped by his second wife for his own one-legged best friend, processes the whole disaster by firing off unsent letters to everyone from his mother to Eisenhower to Spinoza.

Nobody achieves their big dreams. Is Eliot mercilessly describing reality, or making an argument against ambition?

Rich reflects on his truly deranged reaction to the film, after entering a manic state and staying up all night penning a 2500 word rant. Meanwhile Cam had a nice time at the cinema and gives it a soft seven.

How does a general who can stare down an armed mob go to pieces over his wife's handkerchief? A special investigation into race-swapped casting, bad epistemology, and why men have a deep-seated fear of being cucked.

Yeah, it's big brain time. Could two superintelligent beings cooperate, or would they have to annihilate each other? An AI doom classic from 1991.

Dissecting the iconic opening line, the precise nature of Ishmael's relationship with our fellow New Zealand native Queequeg, and the question of race and class politics onboard a whaling ship.

A meditation on violence, manifest destiny, self-mythology, and one author's cunning plot to position himself within the literary canon.

The boys put down the heavy tomes for a short story — well, maybe a thought experiment. A meditation on infinity (or almost-might-as-well-be infinity). There are a lot of books.

The elephant in the room is magical realism: have we found our kryptonite? An often-maddening, always-magical journey to Macondo.