TOBI'S DESK

Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha. There was a time when I found online dating apps addictive. It was a guiltless game: arbitrarily judging prospects by a series of photos, a far-fetched emoji or two, and a pickup line purloined from some seedy Internet forum. Does he like cilantro? (He should not.) Does he travel? (He should.) It’s no secret that the methods of modern romance have long been under fire. In retrospect, it’s equally unsurprising just how many people Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”—the New Yorker story that inundated the Internet last December—resonated with. In that story, Roupenian shows she has a disconcertingly accurate eye for the ways we misjudge and miscommunicate our desires in today’s perfunctory dating culture, often to catastrophic ends. Her forthcoming short-story collection, You Know You Want This , is destined to be even more devastating. Roupenian sets the scene in “The Good Guy,” one of her eleven new stories in the collection: “It was al

Since 2014, when Jeff Jackson and I roamed the AWP Writers Conference together, I’ve read everything he’s written—that I know of, anyway. Jeff’s style is a grab bag of tricks from the journalist, the diarist, the theorist, the historian, and the artist of high letters. The beauty of his work lies in that he can range so wide, plunge so deep, and roar so high, and still be not merely readable but compulsively, achingly sensitive. To my great pleasure, his latest offering, Destroy All Monsters , has been hailed pretty much across the board for the brilliantly dangerous book it is. The New York Times calls it “a wild roar of a novel” that is “predatory and seductive.” The Los Angeles Times says it is “formally complex, experimental, poetic, puzzling … beautifully written and just plain daring.” NPR notes that the work “forces readers to ask all the right questions … while telling them a beautiful truth,” and, that, with a nod to Led Zeppelin, that hierophant of sex and drugs and rock

Edmond Baudoin is a force of nature who holds a singular position in the French comics scene. An ink-stained Proust, his drawings and his memory keep bringing him back to the small, Southern French village of his youth as well as the nearby city of Nice, on the Mediterranean coast. In many of his books, you see the same woodland paths, the same barren views of Nice harbor, the same faces: his own adolescent self, his parents, his brother. He came to cartooning relatively late in life—his first album (as the French call their bound comic books) wasn’t published until he was forty years old, in the early eighties. From his earliest works, Baudoin focused on autobiography, making him one of the first French cartoonists to explore this genre, which has gone on to become one of the most prominent features of European literary comics. At the same time, his art—already confident, with an inky expressionist manner reminiscent of his contemporaries Jacques Tardi and José Antonio Muñoz—evolved

My copy of Lilith’s Brood , with a breadfruit, soon to be made into an edible bowl. I’ve read the book six times, as the damage to my copy shows.   The most perfect alien abduction scene in all of literature occurs in Dawn , the first volume of Octavia Butler’s Imago trilogy. Butler (1947–2006) was a rarity, a black woman publishing science fiction in the eighties, and the Imago trilogy is her masterpiece. On the first page, the protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, comes to consciousness with the words “Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.” She finds herself in a familiar room with “light-colored—white or gray, perhaps” walls and anonymous touches like a bed that’s “a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.” Lilith has been here before, has undergone weeks or maybe years of questioning by disembodied voices that come from the ceiling, has lost her mind and fallen asleep or lost consciousness only to reawaken and be put through it all again. This t

“When they ask what [God’s] name is, what shall I tell them?” —Exodus 3:13 “Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.” —Dr. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) 1. Attar of Nishapur , the 12th-century Persian Sufi, wrote of a pilgrimage of birds. His masterpiece The Conference of the Birds recounts how 30 fowls were led by a tufted, orange hoopoe (wisest of his kind) to find the Simurgh, a type of bird-god or king. So holy is the hoopoe, that the bismillah is etched onto his beak as encouragement to his fellow feathered penitents. From Persia the birds travel to China, in search of the Simurgh, a gigantic eagle-like creature with the face of a man (or sometimes a dog) who has lived for millennia, possesses all knowledge, and like the Phoenix has been immolated only to rise again. In the birds’ desire to see the Simurgh, we understand how we should yearn for Allah: “Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God; / Do all