Critical Essays Archive

Writing a Home for All My Ghosts

A home doesn’t feel like a home when there are structures built to immortalize those who dehumanized entire populaces. But it feels a little more like home when we’re marching, when we fill spaces with our bodies, our friends, our loves, our strangers, shouting out the names of the

The Musicality of Memory in The Hakawati

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Rabih Alamaddine’s 2008 novel unleashes music and sound to interrogate the deeply profound and sublime in the seemingly mundane and ordinary.

Lexicon Land

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Florida is in a constant state of post-apocalypse. Authors are not immune to this speculative affliction, and when they set their fantasies in Florida, the reinvention of language abounds.

Emma Cline’s Fairy Tale Gone Wrong

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
To Cline’s Evie, a young girl whose parents are too preoccupied with their respective post-divorce transformations to truly see her and support her, leaving the mild, mind-numbing safety of her small-town and stepping onto a cult leader’s ranch is like stepping into a fairy tale world.

The Grounding Power of the Past

The gravitational pull of the physical is a placeholder for the mental, emotional, and spiritual work that Sarah M. Broom’s 2019 book, and the stories within, is doing.

James Alan McPherson’s Masterpieces

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
I am inevitably an outsider to the worlds McPherson wrote about and can only understand them as such, but for me his writing cut across race, culture, age, and geography to reach the most ignorant of audiences, and to show me what a real “masterpiece” looked like.

The Fancy and Imagination of Herman Melville

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
The frolicking of sailors aboard a ship’s deck reminds Herman Melville of young horses, which might lead him to the “gambols” of whales. In associations such as these, Melville shows us the incongruities and false gilding we add to life in order to make it more palatable, less terrifying.

The Ethics of Delight

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
We could try to protect ourselves at this time from dread, despair, and our own fury; or, like Ross Gay, we could seek delight, and find through it a doorway into engagement in the world, painful as it might be.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 115-Year-Old Feminist Utopia

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
In her satirical critique of the patriarchy in which she imagines a new, feminist society, Hossain’s 1905 short story “Sultana’s Dream” alludes to some of the most pressing contemporary global crises—epidemic disease, human displacement, overdependence on non-renewable energy, militarization of local police forces and the carceral mindset.

Meeting and Making Heroes

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Jenn Shapland’s lyrical debut demonstrates how she has been made by, and has remade, her hero Carson McCullers—and how this relationship between writer and subject is at the heart of every biography, and every memoir.