Critical Essays Archive
The Power of Documenting Your Own Story
Patricia Engel’s new novel demonstrates the importance of taking back your narrative, of learning and documenting your own story for no one but yourself.
The Act of Making a Home in Severance
Ling Ma’s 2018 novel is a story about what it means to make a life when one has been removed—whether willingly or by force—from one’s familiar surroundings, and the faith and perseverance required in order to call a new place home.
The Stories Inherited in Speak, Okinawa
Elizabeth Miki Brina traces the stories of her mother and father and delves into the relationships between their homes to examine her inheritances and figure out how they’ve manifested within her.
In the Company of Men’s Long View of History
To take the long view of history is to find company with our ancestors. In Véronique Tadjo’s 2017 novel, available today in English, it is “Baobab, the first tree, the everlasting tree, the totem tree” that sees humanity from this perspective.
Two Contemporary Retellings of The Playboy of the Western World
John Millington Synge’s 1907 play is now a classic, examining, among other elements, the definition of a hero and the role of the community in that definition. Over a hundred years later, two contemporary novels, both set following the 2008 financial crisis, echo it in numerous ways.
The Creation, Innovation, and Evolution of Early Anti-Racism Writing
Olaudah Equiano’s genre-defining slave narrative is at once an adventure novel, bildungsroman, and a conversion story. Each of these forms contributes to his argument for the abolishment of slavery, and his creation of this literary framework is the origin to which today’s anti-racism writing can be traced.
Long Poems, Long Sentences
After almost fifty years of his poetry, Muldoon has prepared his readers for a journey not through our own predictable circles—these syntactical maps rule out one’s own choice between right or left—but to arrive somewhere comfortably unexpected.
The Handmaid’s Tale and the Silencing of a Woman’s Voice
While many have praised the book’s feminist themes, none have noticed that the Hulu adaptation highlights Atwood’s special warning intended for women writers, historians, artists, and documentarians. In a patriarchal society turned radical and violent, a woman’s voice will be stifled by taking away the written word.
Remembering the Future
Since reading Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 novel last year, I have wanted to identify and investigate my own family lexicon, the basis of our unity in the pressure of our semi-quarantine in a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment with no yard and not much of a view.
This Land Made You
Melissa Faliveno’s 2020 essay collection’s genius, and tenderness, comes from a deep understanding of the language of home: the haunting, often unacknowledged pull place has on us, and how leaning towards and pushing against this pull shapes our identities.