Critical Essays Archive
Prospero the Homeschool Teacher
Even to an erudite mage like Shakespeare’s Prospero, Miranda’s mind is mysterious and powerful, her memory evocative of her individual, autonomous character. He’s done his best to teach her, despite the circumstances, but no teacher can say with certainty what a student will remember and what will be forgotten.
The Art of Ambiguity
In Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, time’s tricky manifestations in the material world point toward ambiguity itself as a poetics of unknowing and unseeing.
Revisiting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“When John le Carré died in December, I was drawn to revisit his 1974 espionage masterpiece. Its plotting was just as crystalline as I’d remembered, yet its enduring power didn’t lie, I realized, in its structure or entertainment value, but in the lucidity of its politics and moral investments.”
The Fragmentary City of Bright Felon
Kazim Ali's 2009 book is built like a city: fragmentary, recursive, and at once public and personal. Travel fragments the narrator’s experience and story, shattering the idea that an autobiography should be told in complete sentences.
Othering and Empathy in Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid’s debut novel delicately and insightfully examines the naiveté and smugness exhibited by people who consider themselves allies yet only understand how to speak and behave as allies in times of clear and immediate strife—and who, even then, are only familiar with the performative aspects of the task.
Beauty and Crystal Boys
Pai Hsien-Yung’s 1983 novel is a story of exile: the narrative centers itself on the transience of home, and the chaos of the birth-family, in order to argue that home does not come from location, but from aesthetics—from beauty.
On Master Suffering
CM Burroughs’s poems invite intersubjective understanding, even “so much empathy,” while also insisting on the speaker’s self-ownership, the space between self and other. They interrogate mastery and also resist it; the collection is rife with rich ambiguities.
Swamplandia!’s Grief
Reflective on themes of environmental degradation and indigenous erasure, Karen Russel’s 2011 novel serves as a memorial to Florida’s past, and as a reminder of the constant fortitude we must maintain to protect this place.
Reading Rilke in Lockdown
I’ve found myself turning to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems again and again over the last year, his words giving me space to release myself from the prison of my own feelings, and offer an alternative, even curative, way to live in the world.
Reading William Trevor’s “A Day” and Jamel Brinkley’s “Comfort”
Brinkley’s story, written in response to Trevor’s, echoes the latter’s plot, characters, and structure, but in capturing its tone—a gentleness and a very light touch—the story transcends the original, its ending resonating with meaning.