Labyrinths

"Why are penetrating questions so much harder to formulate than penetrating answers?" critic Louis Bury asks. Why, indeed. It's a great question, and also the throughline of Labyrinths: New and Selected Writings. In this collection, Munro formulates penetrating questions (punctums) again and again, and with style and economy. The stories that follow are never reduced to examples, illustrating one theory or another, but answer these questions in the most fitting way possible: by giving them an additional fillip, enriching each. This is the kind of twist only literature (and the humanities) can provide.

Labyrinths is Munro's seventh book and continues his tradition of gnomic-styled writings that have been described as "intellectual origami," "koan-like," "flower-like," and "rooted in sweetness," with lines of inquiry that "auto-deconstruct, bridges crumbling as the author crosses them." The current volume gathers into a fragrant florilegium the best of earlier writings with newer pieces that bring together in artfully whimsical fashion Aristotle, Gilles Deleuze, G.W.F. Hegel, Giorgio Agamben, Graham Harman, Fred Moten, the Mahābhārata, Marcel Proust, Andrea Long Chu, aesthetics, parables, kōans, autotheory, Franz Kafka, Ovid, Rey Chow, bell hooks, Lauren Berlant, Baruch Spinoza, and more.