Critical Essays Archive
Compact Spaces and Relationships in Howards End and On Beauty
E.M. Forster’s novel is deeply concerned with compactly contained relationships, as well as the ideas and spaces that forge these connections. Zadie Smith’s modern-day retelling explores similarly contained personal relationships with a significant update: the book is set on a college campus.
Reading The Book of Men
Nano Shabtai’s 2015 book feels especially personal to me. For the past three years, I’ve been working on a memoir about how the world of relationships is experienced through the eyes of a woman who is often troubled by sex but has been instructed her entire life to prioritize
The Language of Domestic Violence
Rachel Louise Snyder’s 2019 book demonstrates how even imperfect language can be powerful and why word choice is especially important when speaking about this complicated crime.
The Deft Characterization of Starling Days
While Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s latest novel includes living with mental illness as a central theme, it, more importantly, presents a picture of how human beings—whatever the disposition of their brains—try to make sense of what they are experiencing to the best of their abilities.
On the Murmuring of Books and the Abyss
A library is not just a building, nor can it keep books entirely sealed off from the rest of the world—a library is also a network of books speaking of books, “as if they spoke among themselves.”
Breaking the Borders of Memories, Ghosts, and Shadows in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
Michael Zapata’s new novel is a story about stories, literature about literature, a universe about universes. Memories, ghosts, and shadows all guide the protagonists as they try to keep their stories and homes and loves with them.
The Peninsula of Lost Youth
Floridian literature provides us with some evidence that the state’s aggressive setting takes an occasional youth back as a tax, like a spiteful Old Testament god, haunting every scrub habitat, clear-cut forest, abandoned development site, or drained swamp.
The Subtle Interrogation of Power in The Pillow Book
Sei Shonagon’s book, completed in the year 1002, interrogates power and powerlessness through the use of formal hybridity, offering itself up as an unexpected progenitor of our current literary scene.
Appalachia from the Outside
In taking on the Rainbow Murders in her new memoir, Emma Copley Eisenberg also takes responsibility for presenting a clearer picture of Appalachia—a balance that is particularly difficult to achieve when discussing the killing of two young women.
The Bittersweet Flavor of Influence
Jonathan Fine’s recently published personal essay asks how one separates one’s own work from all that precedes it. How does one escape the anxiety of influence when influence is literally all around?