My bad review was something else again: my writer friends thought it was great. It was an opportunity, a platform, a megaphone, a lemon about to be transmuted into the most ambrosial lemonade. The very things that made it bad made it good: its frivolity displayed my depth, its confusion threw into relief my steely logic, its snark showed all too clearly who the real wit was. Thank You for Hating My Book

It feels like betrayal, to be shut out of the comforts of a traditional, Aristotelian narrative, with its precise storytelling arc. “Now a whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end,” wrote the old philosopher, about the shaping of tragedy in “The Poetics.” It may seem like a truism — of course a story must have a beginning and a middle and an end — but it has cast a long shadow over the making of narrative (and other arts) in the West. Resisting its strictures, and playing with endings, has become almost a genera in itself. The