Critical Essays Archive
The Power of Love in A Little Devil in America
Hanif Abdurraqib bases much of what he writes on the things he loves, whether that be music or literature, basketball or sneakers. It's through his love that he is able to reveal insights into artists and performers themselves, as well as the way that history links to the present—both
Hybridity and Indigenous Identity in the Work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Betasamosake’s work exemplifies the brilliant possibilities of hybrid forms. Hybridity in genre allows Indigenous literature the freedom to shape-shift, to tell a story the best way it can be told, and to let that story live among its relatives, whether they be short story, memoir, or song.
The Meaning of Food in Eat Joy
In this 2019 anthology, Natalie Eve Garrett collects short essays by 31 different writers, each with a recipe linked to it. The essays reveal how foods hold the shape of memories and people and places, nourishment intertwined with the forces that shaped it.
Simone Weil’s Practice of Attention
Weil’s unflagging appeal is in the way she calls us to the miracle of presence in lives beset by struggle. This practice of attention need not ask of all of us the sacrifice it asked of her, but it asks of us something.
The Time and the Cure: The Moment of The Magic Mountain
Despite time being such a central concern of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, when I chose to read it at the beginning of the pandemic I did not have in mind that it was a novel about time. I thought of it as the pinnacle of the bildungsroman, and a
Italo Calvino and the Form of Outer Space
When the distinction between form and content is difficult to perceive, it can become nearly impossible to articulate the relationship between these supposed opposites. This tangle of questions is not limited to the arts; the problem of form and matter is important to anyone who deals with questions of
The Dawn of the Queer Ecological Novel
The need for a queer ecological novel is increasingly apparent, as it becomes difficult to imagine any story, any life, unaffected by the reality of climate change.
Finding Sincerity at The Cheesecake Factory
Part cultural critique and part bildungsroman, Rax King’s debut essay collection offers a rigorous defense of low culture while charting her adolescence in the early 2000s, each cultural totem serving as a lens through which she explores her budding sexuality, her father’s death, and her abusive first marriage.
Oppen on the Unfinished Voyage
Facing George Oppen’s “shipwreck of the singular” positions one to reconsider a problem with the act of naming, of not remaining silent: to name our own singularity ignores the material of the wreck, the end of one’s own life equivalent to the end of the world.
The Grief of the Anthropocene in Paige Lewis’s Space Struck
Inextricably intertwined with the seeming power of the Anthropocene is a deep grief for the loss of a world that we suspect once existed, that we catch glimpses of, but that eludes us more each day.