Critical Essays Archive
The Meaning of Home
In her 2016 memoir, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa travels to Tibet after a lifetime away. As a refugee, Dhompa has lived in Nepal, India, and San Francisco, but it is her return that leads her to consider what home means to an exile—it is the center of loss, rediscovery, and
Cultish’s Exploration of Manipulative Language
People are often mystified about how anyone could get involved in a cultish group, or may vaguely think that “brainwashing” was involved. Indeed, while we might feel safer if there were more esoteric or arcane tricks being used, Montell argues that cults bewitch followers exactly the same way that
Women in Myths
In such ancient stories as The Odyssey, women, who are often archetypes and who typically exist in the margins, are enlivened when their stories are told by contemporary writers, freeing them from their limited roles
Enduring Love
Betsy Bonner’s new memoir offers no solutions for the gap between the idea of unconditional love and limited human experience. Less an exorcism than a tribute, it strives to make every stylistic quirk mirror the halting but deeply-felt contours of her relationship with her sister.
Memory, Mediocrity, and Gentrification in Zone One
Combining elegant craft and clairvoyant perspective with tropes of the zombie novel, Colson Whitehead unsettles our conception of what it means to be human, to connect with each other, and how we understand what defines us as individuals.
The Threshold of Memory and Return
Confronting the manifestations of trauma in individual people and larger communities, the nonlinear form of Iman Humaydan’s 2012 novel exposes the importance of living with complexity despite its accompanying discomfort in the context of the Lebanese Civil War and beyond.
We Wish You Luck’s Writerly Campus Novel
There is something thrilling about a campus novel, the way its borders close around a defined perimeter and an alluring clique. Caroline Zancan’s entry to the genre, set at a premier low-residency MFA program, pushes the campus novel into such an academic, writerly realm that it takes on the
Dybek, Shalamov, and Condensed Milk
The transformation of milk into preserved milk is a magic trick of sorts, a way to extend the life of a perishable product. Although in very different ways, Varlam Shalamov’s “Condensed Milk” and Stuart Dybek’s “Pet Milk” are interested in considering man’s ability to do the same.
The Prophecy of Raymond Carver’s “Errand”
Two years before his death from lung cancer, Carver wrote a story fictionalizing the death of Anton Chekov, from tuberculosis.
The Social Constructs of Womanhood in I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
The protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s new novel refuses to perform motherhood, wifedom, and womanhood within the strictures of these words. But her refusal calls into question her very character, in others’ eyes and sometimes also her own. If she doesn’t fulfil these roles, what is she?