Fate/stay night and Kinoko Nasu feel like a whole genre on their own. But why aren’t there more Nasu copycats?

Nine book reviews to catch up on what I’ve been reading and enjoying while taking a bit of a break from blogging.

Love & Pop is a unique piece of art because it does not present answers, it presents a world too contradictory for any such thing to exist.

Tsukumojuuku by Outarou Maijou succeeds in crafting something that seems authentically confessional out of deconstruction and metatext.

A guest post? A review of an entire short story anthology? Now, this is something entirely different from usual…

To be direct about it, Our Broken World (Sekai vol. 1) is my favourite novel ever written. Here is a review.

To cut right to the chase, Glass Onion is less original than Knives Out. However, it finds some stable qualities that allow it to stand up to its predecessor.

Exploring the limits of authorial intent in video games through The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide.

The discussion of the dichotomy between “art” and “entertainment” dates back centuries. Regardless of what one thinks of the artistic value of Marvel’s films, it bares re-examining the question of what separates “art” from “mere entertainment” in the current age.

Nabokov’s Despair takes the form of a mystery novel, inverts it, and stuffs its insides with the aesthetics and logic of artistic, modernist fiction. In this sense, it might well be the first true “anti-mystery”.