The absence of camels (opens in new tab)

I was fascinated, maybe even more, by the story's second principal feature: the town had no name; nor did the streets; nor did the characters. And nor did the continent they were all in and by which, to some extent, they—human beings and objects—had been turned into what they were. The story abounded in specificity, but the specificity of identity that comes from proper names was absent, turning detail itself into absence: by which I mean not a void or abstraction, but into a negation or refu...