Critical Essays Archive
Fact and Fiction in Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive
Reading both of Valeria Luiselli’s most recent books, which each center on the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border, is a powerful experience—doing so can show us our own complicity in what is often a “background story.”
The Art of Lying
As any reader knows, the best storytellers are the best liars. Karen Russell, master of magical realism, has time and again proved her abilities—most recently, in her new collection, a book.
Too Young to Know
Great child narrators feel like a Oulipo trick, pulled off seamlessly. Instead of writing without certain letters, writers of child narrators blind themselves to certain truths.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Treatise on Abuse
These roles that men and women play are a mutilation. So, too, are the neocolonial systems that ask people to inhabit them.
Loss and Exile in Héctor Abad’s Oblivion
Like all exile stories, for Héctor Abad to survive, he has to avenge the tragedy of loss by hanging on to the good, even when it returns him to sadness.
The Modernism of Henry James’ Washington Square
James Lipton, theatre director and host of Bravo’s Inside the Actor’s Studio, has a pet theory about actors and entertainers he trots out on air from time to time, a theory he bases on hundreds of interviews: children of divorce often become artists—particularly of the theatrical sort. He describes
The Women of James Salter’s Dusk and Other Stories
Salter’s women remain ciphers throughout his collection, defined by their looks or their perceived demands on the men in their lives. But the women occupy powerful positions throughout the collection despite these spare characterizations because they allow the reader a chance to view the primary narrative from the outside.
Mystery, Adventure, and Coming of Age
Lore Segal’s “Dandelion” and Karen Russell’s “The Bad Graft” are two expedition stories set in vastly different worlds.
The Internal Landscape in James Wood’s Upstate
If a critic can write through a text, in what sense, then, does the novelist write through life?
Transmigrations in Joyce and Somerville & Ross
Perhaps in crediting those moments which, in our conscious and unconscious absorption and output, cannot seem to be erased, we come closer to that motley and cosmic source of progress whose symmetry cannot be framed.