Critical Essays Archive
The Queer Power of Fairy Tales
In a country in which “fairy tales predetermine reality,” the protagonist of Katya Kazbek’s new novel’s re-creation of a folk tale allows him to engineer his queer liberation.
Authenticity and Artifice in The Candy House
At its most fundamental level, Jennifer Egan’s new novel is about stories, about how humans are inclined to shape information into narrative.
Sara Lippmann’s Turns in Jerks
Even though the characters in Sara Lippmann’s second story collection are often stuck in their lives, a sense of life, of possibility, of creation, runs throughout the book, uniting its stories as one. Lippmann focuses on the unexpected and on the surprising in order to focus on life.
A House Between Earth and the Moon’s Technology Tension
Rebecca Scherm’s approach to technology is both familiar and alien to us. Our devices pull us further apart from one other. Yet this sense of hyper-connection is still connection. Read through the register of family, the relational potential for technology gets even murkier.
Finding Home in An American Sunrise
Joy Harjo’s 2019 collection accesses the painful memories and losses that so many of her people have suffered. But the strength of her poetry goes beyond just recounting the pain.
The Root of Passing in The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping epic engages with a richness of Black life and history far beyond her characters’ proximity to whiteness alone. By tracing the African American experience back to its roots, she has created a canon-worthy work that exposes the complexity of color and the deep wounds passing
Revisiting The Intuitionist
Colson Whitehead’s first book is a complex story that takes an authoritative point of view within a deeply imagined world.
Alice Arden of Faversham and Women’s Interest in True Crime
Sixteenth century literature provides a compelling explanation for women’s engagement with true crime: in many cases, it portrays women in control, rather than victims, of violence.
Chaos and Meaning in Ocker
Humans derive pleasure in finding order within disorder. We seek out patterns and meaning, even when there is none to be found. P. Inman’s 1982 book, through its performance of an open and chaotic writing system, calls our attention back to how heavy this burden of meaning can become.
Privileging Survivors’ Voices
Books by M. Evelina Galang, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Kim Soom fill critical gaps in the public’s understanding of World War II rape camps run by the Imperial Japanese Army—euphemistically referred to as “comfort stations.”