Critical Essays Archive
Revisiting Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World
This memoir of nineteen-year-old Maynard’s relationship with fifty-three-year-old JD Salinger is a nuanced exploration of power dynamics in a relationship, and an important #MeToo read.
The Language of Trauma in Kevin Goodan’s Anaphora
Kevin Goodan seizes on the persistent remembering that characterizes PTSD in his new book, creating an elegy that develops a kind of poetic logic of the fear system.
The Complicated Radicalism of Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey
While a woman translating Homer’s epic is certainly a huge milestone, Wilson’s interpretation is a radical, fascinating achievement regardless of her gender.
Harassment and Linguistic Inquiry in Milkman
Anna Burns’s novel, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, centers on unwanted sexual attention in an environment where safety is already not only unlikely, but impossible.
The World of Yesterday’s Documentation of the Great Wars
Stefan Zweig’s autobiography serves as a poignant warning as the world grapples with the rise of ethno-nationalism.
An Epidemic of Violence in Destroy All Monsters
Early in Jeff Jackson’s latest novel, the media reports on a new kind of epidemic that is spreading across America: musicians in rock bands are being shot while performing live on stages of small music venues. What follows is a work that, in its lack of answers, serves as
The Resurgence of the Witch’s Tale
Witch-hunting, Silvia Federici has written, developed in a world where communal relations were crumbling under the emergence of capitalism; from that moment on, the witch was the woman who escaped and defied patriarchal authority—and for this, she has always had to be punished.
Exploring the Self in Orlando and The Puttermesser Papers
Virginia Woolf and Cynthia Ozick both feature protagonists who flaunt societal gender-based expectations like marriage and children in their mock-biographies.
What It Means To Say Goodbye to a Language
Vladimir Nabokov wrote English prose so piercing and pristine we forget the language was not his natural idiom. In leaving his native Russian behind, to find new readers and paying publishers, he gave up not just a language, but also the warm familiarity of cultural shorthand and common referents
Writing From Exile
Regarding writing in exile within one’s own country, James Baldwin might facetiously ask, “Exiled from which America?” He might invoke W.E.B. Du Bois’ double-consciousness and say, “You should know you were only really a part of it insomuch as you could see out of your own eyes and perceive,