Critical Essays Archive
Writing Racist Characters
There are uniquely white stories that all white people know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.
Imagination and the American West
Carys Davies’ debut novel reveals that mythologies often arise from foolish beginnings but that the elevated stories that emerge are no less valuable.
The Poetry in Footnotes, Endnotes, Annotations, & Bibliographies
In new collections by Marwa Helal, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Chaun Webster, we find rich archives of ideas and texts that hold within them visions of a future where people can fly and where people can also stay to flourish in the place they call home.
Supreme’s Co-Optation of Barbara Kruger’s Oeuvre
If Supreme is recognized for Barbara Kruger's iconic messages, is the brand co-opting and altering her words, thus changing Kruger’s rhetorical impact on an audience? What is the rhetorical purpose behind Kruger’s work?
Shame, Shamelessness, and Violence
Salman Rushdie’s fantastical 1983 novel explores and illustrates the slippery relationship between shame and violence—when accumulated, the former often leads to the latter.
James Joyce and Rebecca Lee’s Dinner Party Revelations
In fiction, it is never a good idea to attend a dinner party. We read dinner party stories to get messy, to get everybody drunk, and to hear what they’ve been keeping quiet about for years. These fictional parties almost always end in a revelation, and usually not a
How the United States Nurtures Violence
While the characters of Laila Lalami’s newest novel confront and sometimes overcome the discomfort caused by their differences, Lalami presents one final troubling question for her readers: what markers of violence have our willingly blind eyes allowed to fester?
The American Dream in The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
Lucette Lagnado’s 2007 memoir is a testament to the difficulties that are so inherent to the immigration process that even a family of people who are educated, upper-class, and well-off experience them.
Memory and Heartbreak in To The River
While Olivia Laing’s 2011 book is a remarkable piece of nature writing, it is, at its core, a book about a heart mending itself and the unwieldiness of memory.
The Uncannily Foreign World of Westside
Reading W.M. Akers’ debut novel is a magnificent experience, but it is uncomfortable, to say the least—the world it depicts, a 1921 version of Manhattan, is not so unfamiliar after all. As fantasy novels often do, the book offers a disturbing allegory for our times.