Critical Essays Archive
Levity and Storytelling in A Christmas Carol
With the indefinite article “a,” Dickens seems to declare that the story is not about a carol, but is, instead, itself a Christmas carol: a song for the season.
The Complicated Reality of Travel in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
The stories of ZZ Packer’s 2003 collection often feature characters in new environments, struggling to navigate their changed surroundings; travel pervades the book, but its pieces refute fantasies in favor of more complex realities of what can happen on a journey.
Distance and Home
Writing, to me, is home. I grew up in a family of Cuban exiles. Every Sunday, they told stories about Cuba, a place I couldn’t touch or hear or smell, but that I could, at least in my mind, see. Writing forced me to look closer at these homes,
Lying to Tell the Truth
Philippe Besson clearly wants to discourage his readers from mistaking his novelistic creation for straightforward autobiography. Equally, though, Besson prompts us to question our assumptions, to pay attention not only to the fictiveness of his novel, but also to the narrative quality of our own life stories.
Italo Calvino and the New Gods of Boston
The visibility or invisibility of a city’s parts is always in flux, but this year it was dizzying. In March and April, Boston felt like a ghost town—its trains, streets, and office buildings emptied. The students disappeared, and so did my neighbor, Gary, who didn’t have a home to
Emptiness and Red Pill
Discovering emptiness within himself while far from home, the unnamed narrator of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel falls under the influence of a champion of the alt-right and awakens—it seems—to a brutal reality. But this understanding of reality, too, turns out to be partial, provisional.
Beauty in the Ordinary
In James Salter’s 1975 novel, style is a form of truth, or at least one of the more direct means of apprehending truths. In the rhythms of his descriptive passages, one gets a sense that he has conveyed a sense of the world as it really is.
Desert Myths
In his multimedia venture, Desert Oracle, Ken Layne centers preservation, protection, and treading lightly on the land.
Alice Sheldon’s Unveiling of Humanity
In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” a futuristic society has found a loophole in a law forbidding commercial advertisements—the use of “gods,” young, beautiful, pre-programmed, and mechanically-engineered celebrities whose lives are a series of opportunities for product placement. In this world, where perfection has been manufactured, the flawed
The Other Wes Moore’s Exploration of a Life’s Trajectory
In 2010, Wes Moore published his memoir, a unique take on the genre that recounts his history with another Wes Moore. In it, he offers a truthful portrait of his life and the “other” Moore’s, showing as he does so the impact that role models and support can have