Critical Essays Archive
Kate Baer and the Search for Grace
Kate Baer explores the potential of the erasure poem and shows how attention can uncover hidden grace.
Food and Trauma in Nigel Slater’s Toast
Nigel Slater demonstrates an original and expert use of food in his 2011 memoir, as a sort of spyglass through which to investigate his own life, and as a thread with which to weave a tapestry full of deep unexplored emotions and intense memories.
Unmaking the Myth of Ian Curtis
Deborah Curtis’s biography-cum-memoir moves beyond pop culture mythmaking, in the process creating the connection Joy Division’s music reaches for but is never able to grasp.
Morphine’s Resonant Portrayal of Addiction
If one were to substitute “opioid” for “morphine,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1926 novella feels like it could have been written yesterday. Reading it is thus nearly unbearable: it asks us to look at how little perception and treatment of substance use disorder has changed over the course of a hundred
Solidarity and Differentiation in Detransition, Baby
In teasing out the nuance in discussions about how people of all gender identities can relate to one another, showing solidarity while still acknowledging their differences, Torrey Peters manages to, as she states in her 2020 novel’s acknowledgements, present “trans feminine culture in the new millennium.”
Milk Blood Heat’s Dreams Lost
Dantiel W. Moniz’s stories explore characters dealing with the loss of the people they share a home with; we see how their subsequent isolation and retreat to the worlds in their heads forms a connective tissue with the loves they’ve lost—and can result in the losing of oneself.
Cassandra at the Wedding’s Economies of Sisterhood
The relationship between Cassandra and Judith, in Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel, shows the ease with which siblings in general, and sisters in particular, continually create roles for each other—roles that are difficult to escape.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’s New Ways of Writing the Dying World
Richard Flanagan’s latest novel shows us how a writer can tell the story of our anxious, disturbed world in a meaningful way.
Mundanity Among Tragedy in How High We Go in the Dark
Published two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel is in some ways comforting, and in others a brutal reflection of our current moment. Through the course of the tragedies and mundanities explored within, every facet of every person’s life is altered; Nagamatsu explores how people handle
A Trick of the Light
Macbeth’s failures are failures to understand the interplay of perspective and perception in interpretation.