Helen DeWItt's tour de force, one-of-a-kind novel, The Last Samurai is a Certified Copacetic Classic™, so we've been anticipating this long-rumored (and long, at 608 pages) book for quite awhile, and now it's here.  It is a collaboration with the journalist, Ilya Gridedd, and yes, it's a crazy labyrinth of lives within lives played out through books within books that will have your head spinning, but it's also a heartfelt requiem for the dismal state of classical liberal arts scholarship, literary life, and, most of all, authentic personal creativity here in the era of late-capitalism where value and price have become indistinguishable (and, in the process, more-or-less explicitly frames itself as the 8 1/2 of novels). 

For a more in-depth exploration of this book – and its back story – we direct you to Jess Bergman's write up for The Nation, HERE.