Critical Essays Archive
What is A Ghost in the Throat For?
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s 2020 novel is a conversation between women, one of whom has the freedom to speak her long and impassioned set-piece in her famous keen but perilous little more, and another who is—by facing squarely that seductive, obliterating control that could empty room after room—creating herself.
Jana Prikryl, From the Fields of a Calendar
The poems that imagine photographs, the making and distribution of images to one or many friends, to strangers, revisit a figurative injection posed in Jana Prikryl’s first collection: a poem is not functional, a poem is something to be experienced in time.
The Fanfiction of A Little Life
Fanfiction pummels its readers with emotion, nearly overdosing us on joy, love, sex, and sorrow until we are left feeling exposed. It’s this rawness that fanfiction readers crave, and it’s this same rawness that Hanya Yanagihara brings to the literary world with her 2015 novel.
Activism in Exile
Gisèle Freund’s portraits, shown at the Maison des amis des livres in 1939, of several avant-garde writers and artists, are a collective portrait of a community, rather than a series of individuals. This group of intellectuals, however, would be scattered by the invasion of Paris by the Nazis one
The Word as Souvenir in The Souvenir Museum
Elizabeth McCracken’s stories do more than speak—they wink and flirt, make visual puns as though they are doing a skit together, improvising and seeing if they can get their stage partner to crack, while the reader, seeing the winks and the gestures, knows they are part of the show.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton’s Complication of the Gothic Voice
Sara Collins’s 2019 novel tests and even breaks the boundaries of the gothic voice, showing that a heroine standing on the outside of literary tradition can still inhabit the gothic and push it to new and provocative directions.
The Chaotic Storm of Motherhood in Tomorrow We’ll Go to the Amusement Park
Ilana Bernstein’s 2018 novel is a portrait of a motherhood so demanding and a depression so immersive that it becomes impossible to tell which came first. Throughout the book, the symptoms of the narrator’s different conditions, including being a mother, become indistinguishable from one another, her emotions bleeding into
The Ebb and Flow of Women’s Friendships in Fiona and Jane
Jean Chen Ho’s wonderful debut is a book that is built on memory, a book that speaks to the importance and difficulties and richness of friendship between women over time, a book that braids its form and content together to create meaning.
Two Boston Commons at Twilight
Susan Minot’s story “Boston Common at Twilight” shares its title with a Childe Hassam painting. Although the former does not directly mention the latter, there are many ways that the works are linked, and seeing these connections underscores the themes that run through the story and allows the viewer
The Angel in the Woods
Emily Dickinson knew that modesty and self-confidence, blended together, would disarm her reader and delight and mystify the people around her. Shirking conventionality offered her a modicum of freedom and enlarged her presence simultaneously; she was both eccentric spinster and white-clad angel, depending on how you saw her.