Critical Essays Archive
A City of One’s Own
These days living and working as a writer in Istanbul requires a bravery that most American writers have never imagined they would have to muster, a bravery far beyond what it already takes to put pen to paper.
The Middle of Nowhere in a Comic Pane
Self-hatred, alcoholism, small-town deprecation. Roughneck hits all the rural notes. When a character has a run-in with Oxycontin, the reaction is to immediately blame it on outsiders. “All the kids are getting it from down South,” someone says.
Making (and Breaking) a Poem
One of the hardest things to learn about writing poems is how to break lines—where to enjamb or full-stop, where to leave sentences dangling into surprise, where to make one thing appear like it will be another.
Writing Appalachia
One of the finest contemporary writers mining the extraordinary diversity of the complicated landscape of southern Appalachia is Ron Rash. Rash, whose work sprang to national attention with his novel Serena, writes almost exclusively of these mountains and her foothills.
Maternal Bodies in Vi Khi Nao’s Fish in Exile
In Vi Khi Nao's Fish in Exile, Ethos and Catholic are grief-stricken at the deaths of their infant children. It is Catholic, however, whose body undergoes substantive change and becomes directly conflated with trauma and death.
Spying on the Rich in Crazy Rich Asians and Moll Flanders
In Crazy Rich Asians (2013), Kevin Kwan offers us a window into a world of wealth capable of altering the very ontological condition of the characters who enjoy it. Reading Kwan’s novel, I’m reminded of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722).
Art and Sustenance
Learning from artists, how to write, to draw, to see, taught me of bounty. Their insistence, their calling, always, attention to the smallest things, taught me the most precious kind of survival: the abiding joy and knowledge that there is always something.
Learning to Read Conflict in The Solar Grid
In The Solar Grid, the people on earth are screwed. A global ecological disaster. A corporate-sponsored attempt to “fix” it, and our willingness to assign the label of “third world” to a place so we can ignore it.
What Is the Heart of a Poem?
The first word or two of a poem is such a small thing, one word out of many, but in a poem every single word can hold the weight of the entire piece.
You Can’t Trust Anybody in Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman (And What That Says About Us)
Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman, translated by Christina MacSweeney, interrogates the psyche of characters mired by the Spanish economic crisis and the realities and lies they build around themselves in search of catharsis.