“Teeth,” WebMD informs me, “are the hardest substances [sic] in the human body”. WebMD, to be fair, is not renowned for its semantic precision. Nor its grammatical prowess. Nor its utility as a diagnostic tool. Indeed, WebMD is borderline infamous (albeit endearingly so) for inviting the bored and mildly infirmed to abduce that the cause… Keep Reading
This month there is a bonus episode of the Ark Audio Book Club podcast on David Foster Wallace’s epic of tennis, drug addiction and TV. In preparation for that, the panel has written four short reviews of this very long book, ranging from the very favourable to the sycophantically fawning. Franek (Press play before you… Keep Reading
Over the last few years, Ark Books enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with the all star team at KBH Læser. In 2015 we hosted reading by and a debate on love between Pia Tafdrup and Caspar Eric hosted by long-time friend of the store, Rasmus Varnich Blumensaat. With the introduction of the Ark Audio podcasting platform… Keep Reading
“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. […] Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to… Keep Reading
Ark volunteers pick and present their favourite reads of 2016. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Madness. Roberto Bolaño’s last and massive 900-page novel 2666 cannot, of course, be reduced to one word. But then again, why not? Does this one word not entail an implosion, the collapse of language into metonymic sliding, an utter failure of… Keep Reading
I am part of a group, the members of which consider themselves to be individuals who do not constitute a group. This is, in fact, an essential truth about any group, that groups are not ‘real’ in anything but name and the material consequences resulting from the act of categorization. The majority of these consequences,… Keep Reading
The impossibility of politics and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Macon Holt Whatever happens today with the U.S. there will be something disappointing about it. Unless you naively think, as Slavoj Žižek does, that a rupture of neoliberal capitalism’s support system, in the U.S.A’s political establishment, with a Trump victory, outweighs the possibility of a… Keep Reading