Critical Essays Archive
Reading and Writing to a Home
I read Bryan Washington’s debut short story collection as I helped my family pack up my childhood home in Miami. I had moved to New Orleans over eight years before—close enough to drive back down, but still three states and a world away.
Reading The Refugee Summer
Edward Fenton’s 1982 novel is perhaps one of the better fictional accounts of living at the privileged periphery of a political and then refugee crisis. Importantly, it is also a children’s novel.
Writing Grief
As Naja Marie Aidt goes about the Herculean effort of wrestling with her son’s death, she utilizes a remarkable variety of forms; her grief is expressed not only through the substance of her words, but through the structure of her text.
The Ghost in the Room
Recently published stories by George Saunders and Kate Walbert are about remembering more than they are about the past.
The Enigmatic Figure of the Midwife in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
The midwife has often been an ambiguous figure both in the history of literature and within the history of labor.
Leonora Carrington and the Queer Divine
Glittering with playful weirdness alongside mystical spirituality, Leonora Carrington’s “My Mother is a Cow” converges with the Christian tradition of divine incarnation and infuses it with queerness.
The Enigma of Desire
André Aciman’s 2017 novel is a story specifically focused on desire in all of its forms, but it is the desire to reinvent oneself through romantic love that haunts the novel and is its motivating force.
Power and Obsession in Devotion
The scale of privilege constantly shifts in Madeline Stevens’ debut novel, fostering a lethal combination of gratitude, jealousy, and resentment within its protagonist.
The Desire of Girls in Machine
Rather than being a juvenile or simplistic depiction of desire as purely a physical impulse for the adolescent narrator, Susan Steinberg’s first novel presents desire in the mind of an adolescent girl as a larger force, one that is as much existential as it is universal.
Bipolar Disorder and the Pills that Keep Us Alive
For bipolar disorder, the most tried and true treatment—the most effective one—doesn’t come from a lab; it comes from stardust. It’s an element on the periodic table, atomic number 3.