Critical Essays Archive

The Dissolution of Absolutes en La Frontera

Gabino Iglesias’s recent novel revolves around multiple characters journeying through la frontera, the border between the United States/Mexico. In each of the characters’ stories, however, there are multiple journeys being made, multiple borders being crossed, and as their stories progress, what they're striving for is less and less clear.

The Lives of Others in Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City

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What is to be made of the myriad tales collected in this anthology, some of them connected by geographical proximity and nothing more? Part of the effect is to render the familiar unfamiliar.

The Nearness of the Moon

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Italo Calvino’s work reminds us that curiosity itself is a kind of gravity, a pull that is difficult to understand or measure and yet is instinctively, unavoidably felt.

The Violence of Dehumanizing Language

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Today, it is crucial to return to Executive Order 9066, which directly resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Failing to understand the significance of how difference is articulated and weaponized will lead to a repetition of the same cruelties and mistakes of history.

Autofiction and Juliet Escoria’s Juliet the Maniac

Although our culture’s relationship to fiction and truth has evolved, autofiction, a form of fictionalized biography, has been around as long as people have written books.

The Problem with the Quest Narrative

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Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel uses the problematic traditional quest story to reveal how the intrusion of blind privilege can do real and lasting harm.

The Poetic Instant and Creative Criticism

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I’ve often wondered about the efficacy of my academic training. What good did it do? The definitive effect hasn’t been a breadth of ready knowledge but rather a facility for surprise and a capacity for shaped responses to texts I call “creative criticism.”

Water in The Veins of the Ocean

In Patricia Engel’s 2016 novel, a family, having been exiled from Cartagena, Colombia to the United States, is separated from their country by a vast gulf. But the ocean doesn’t just act as a barrier—it is also the scene of the traumatic event that the protagonist’s life revolves around.

The Unconventional Heroine

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Though Catherine Morland may be neither Austen’s cleverest nor her wisest heroine, the story of how her naiveté is transformed to discernment is no less compelling, showing that understanding others takes a combination of good faith and imagination, tempered by experience.

Van Gogh’s Letters

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Even before he began to devote himself to painting, Van Gogh was gathering layers of experience that provided a way of seeing far beyond the inspiration works of painters he encountered provided him.