Critical Essays Archive
A Romp through the Wilds of Language
The most striking thing about Caroline Knox’s latest poetry collection is the way it savors and explores the nuances of language.
Reading The Human Stain
Philip Roth’s book is an in-depth, punch-in-the-gut study of the notion of judgment and blame-laying.
The Land of Ghosts and Corpses
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, in his 1992 memoir, describes himself and other exiles as corpses, or ghosts.
In the Hotel Lobbies of Sam Shepard and Sally Rooney
Hotels by nature are spaces of temporary, transitory, and hard-to-classify encounters. Setting a story in a hotel frees characters to have discussions they might otherwise not have, to do things they might otherwise refrain from doing.
Women Inventing Feminine Language
To talk about women’s language as wounded is problematic because for so long women’s wounds were either taboo or fetishized. In order to avoid this fetishizing, women find new means of expression by writing outside of existing structures.
Gulfs and Storms
The presence in Belle Boggs’ new novel of the Gulf of Mexico parallels an exploration of the other gulfs that threaten us: between politics and art, art and money, and between people of different beliefs.
The Threat of Forced Domesticity in Pond
Throughout the twenty stories in Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 short story collection, Bennett engages with the relationship between the exterior, natural world and the interior, domestic spaces that her narrator inhabits.
Genderqueer Ancestry in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts
The locus of self in Solomon’s science fiction novel is tied to the body, a genderqueer body deeply and beneficially in conversation with the bodies, of all genders and none, that came before it.
The Multiple Consciousnesses of Exile
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s humor and literary power bring a fresh, clear, and unapologetic voice to the experience of living as an other in the global North while simultaneously shedding light on exile’s true absurdity: that society remains apathetic toward the exiled.
The Fiction of Genius
The social cost of the fiction of genius, which upholds the elite few as inherently more brilliant than everyone else, regardless of underlying biases and inequalities, is unknowable. Helen DeWitt nevertheless captures a sense of this loss across her novel with equal parts fire, humor, and grief.