Critical Essays Archive
Wielding Literature for Truth and Trust
Perhaps the core difficulty in discovering truth exists in lieu of our inability to trust.
The Refugee Narrative as Ghost Story
Migration, especially for refugees, is a violent crossing. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees and Mai Der Vang’s Afterland, the dead, and all else the living abandoned, refuse to be left behind.
Stealth Animal Rights Novels
As A.A. Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh, “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” The simple act of reading about animals challenges the conventional way that humans impose orders on other creatures, without wondering about their lives.
Perfectly Aligned: Inger Christensen’s Poetry Through Her American Translator Susanna Nied
Though Christensen’s work has been well-loved in Europe since the publications of her first two collections of poetry, in Danish, her poetry did not reach American audiences until alphabet, translated by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions in 2001.
Breaking Under the Weight of Formula in The Vision
In the recent Marvel comic, The Vision, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta explore the tight rope between narrative exploration and the expectations of continuity in a series about a family of superpowered robots trying to live a different kind of story.
The Roving Poets of Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College sprung up in the 1930s, near Asheville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a short-lived school born in a time of crisis.
“Adventure of a Skier” and Calvino’s Theory of Lightness
Last week, the New Yorker released the first English translation of Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Skier,” which first appeared in the 1970 short story collection Difficult Loves. How does this “new” story fit into the themes and philosophical musings of the work as a whole?
A Shining City on a Very Strange Hill
The idea that there is something unique, something exceptional about America, dates back to de Tocqueville and has firmly taken root in the nation’s literary and political imagination.
Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Getting My Body Back
Why did nobody tell me it would be this way? Elisa Albert’s narrator, Ari, seems to be asking throughout the novel After Birth. And why is no one around to help me through it now?
The Body Enchanted: Helen Oyeyemi and Consent
In core childhood narratives, elements of magic constantly compromise the bodily autonomy of women, from the prick of your finger on an enchanted spinning wheel to the loss of your voice in exchange for legs. I approached What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours with this narrative baggage in