Michael Robbins

Sometimes I wonder how many books I've read in my four decades. Thousands, anyway — maybe tens of thousands — since the first one, about a choo-choo, when I was...

Renata Adler's first novel, "Speedboat," published in 1976, is that kind of book. The kind you buy multiple copies of to push on friends, the kind you dog-ear and mark...

Ferdinand de Saussure defined semiology as "a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life." We all practice it before we learn the word: High school...

Barred from publishing fiction in the Soviet Union until she was 50 years old and the country was falling apart, the Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya avoids explicit political themes. It...

The great theorist of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan envisioned desire as "caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else." In the rhetorical figure of metonymy,...

Some comic-book writers (Neil Gaiman, for instance) are able to pass through the dimensional portal to imageless genre fiction without loss of spellbinding potency; others — well, the less said...