Critical Essays Archive
Music, Violence, and Joy in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2017 essay collection explores a conflict he sees in his own project, perhaps in any endeavor toward joy: how can one write about music, let alone listen to it or make it, when people are dying?
Reading A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia
I did not know before encountering this anthology’s opening fact that the eastern cougar, “puma, mountain lion, wildcat, catamount, painter, mountain screamer, in all its many names,” had been declared extinct in 2018 from where I am from. This caught a latch in my throat, lighter to such knowledge’s
Searching for Answers in the Enormous
More difficulties mount in consideration of how commodified the Sistine Chapel’s most iconic images have been made; how can a viewer be struck with awe before an image that’s been made into mugs, mouse pads, magnets, and memes?
The Spatialization of Fiction
Spatial conflicts and curiosities (the lighthearted call to the open road, for example) can undergird the entire momentum and tone of a novel. Without knowing a character’s place in the world, it’s challenging to gather the full context of their decisions.
Acceptance in Love
Books by Sally Rooney, Anat Levit, and Daniel Sloss show us how to triumph over tension in relationships: rather than be at war with each other’s pet peeves, lovers share the pain—and perhaps a laugh—when admitting that love is anything but simple.
Inherited Trauma in We Cast a Shadow
What the narrator of Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel doesn’t fully comprehend is that he is worried about his son inheriting trauma from him. Inheriting something that cannot be wiped away.
Luster, A Lover’s Discourse, and the Portrayal of Whiteness
The protagonists of recent novels by Raven Leilani and Xiaolu Guo dwell on a cross-racial gaze, othering the white men who are the objects of their physical affections. In this, they attempt to reverse the gazes of centuries by paying an anthropological attention to their partners’ bodies, speech, and
Parsing Identity in Grief in Himmo, King of Jerusalem
It is for her own future, for a possibility of life for her as well as for the other patients, that the painful reminder of Himmo—the broken, sightless, tortured embodiment of his own country—must be destroyed. Only then can she walk out into the smoking remains and start anew.
Love, Liberation, and Empowerment in Godshot
Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel, out today, feels familiar, devastating, like it has already happened, could, or might again. It’s the story, too, of motherhood in all its iterations, from abandonment to adoption, at the best of times and worst, and the moments, no matter how small, of love.
The Joys of a Journal
Last April, I attended Alexander Chee’s talk on reporting the self. He said: “The thing that you remember is the thing that you live with.” I’d never heard this truth stated so clearly before. What else but memory could be at the root of so many personal conflicts and