Critical Essays Archive

The Island Child’s Myths

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A good story may seem to transform experience into myth, but as Molly Aitken’s debut novel explores, it cannot expunge the realities of the past. Nor is the world of myth any good place actually to live.

Watching King Lear on Zoom

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Technology (whether we mean social networking, video conferencing, virtual reality, or even language itself) can be both perilous and liberating, an architect of intimacy and an architect of loneliness too.

Untold Stories in Last Call on Decatur Street

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Iris Martin Cohen’s new novel is a reflection, a condemnation, and a compassionate call to action; it is the story of how we can start to open our eyes to see better and do better.

The Poetics of Liberation

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The making of necessary new systems of justice and wellness will not be a single act of creation; it will be—and already is—an ongoing act of collaborative composition.

The Value of the Third-Person Perspective in Evicted

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The problematic nature of evictions has come to greater prominence in recent weeks. Such attention is gratifying and long overdue, and in this context, Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book offers an important example of how writing can speak on complex social problems while being respectful of the subject matter and

Past as Place in Subduction

Kristen Millares Young’s novel explores the idea of people’s histories and stories, whether personal or communal, as places that can anchor or be explored and learned from.

Memory and Trauma in Hieroglyphics

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Jill McCorkle’s new novel, out today, is obsessed with memory and trauma: how we are often living two lives at once, our bodies moving and doing in the present while our minds are simultaneously being drawn into the past, both real and imagined.

The Ecopoetics of Empire

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What is at the core of Tracy Zeman’s debut poetry collection is the understanding and articulation of the links between things—between flora and fauna, sediments, barns, fossils, graveyards, and violent events traceable in the landscape and memory.

Reading the Uncanny

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In the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Sequoia Nagamatsu, the uncanny elements that might be unsettling for readers are stand-ins for very familiar things: the complexities of interpersonal relationships and the hardships that some have while moving through the world in the bodies they were born with.

Traumatic Transfiguration in Picnic at Hanging Rock

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Joan Lindsay’s historical novel is about the transformations that take place after trauma, and how trauma is distorted when pressed into the molds of different class experiences, representing the final shapes we are allowed to assume.