Discussed in this essay:

Vile Days, by Gary Indiana, edited by Bruce Hainley. Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95.

Seasonal Associate, by Heike Geissler, translated by Katy Derbyshire. Semiotext(e). 240 pages. $16.95.

The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner. Text Publishing. 176 pages. $16.95.

How unromantic can a deathbed scene get? A test case: one day in 2015, The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, makes his way to the Village Voice’s Cooper Square offices, seeking to rescue the columns he wrote for the alt-weekly in the 1990s from their undigitized obscurity. Let in by a staff member who seems…