Critical Essays Archive
Revisiting Alice Munro’s “Material”
Munro raises questions about the relationship between two things that often coincide in writers: the first is a certain amount of self-indulgence and self-mythologizing; the second is the difficult work of putting aside the ego and observing the world.
Desire in John Wray’s Godsend
Aden Grace Sawyer, the young white American woman inspired by John Walker Lindh who leads John Wray’s latest novel, is on a mission from God.
Cruelty in Literature
What do we learn from new depictions of brutalized bodies in literature?
Levity and Storytelling in A Christmas Carol
With the indefinite article “a,” Dickens seems to declare that the story is not about a carol, but is, instead, itself a Christmas carol: a song for the season.
Sentinels of Grief in The Friend
The Great Dane in Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed novel embodies grief itself—a presence that comes uninvited, demands attention, disrupts routine, behaves inscrutably, and holds the power of ferocity and tenderness at once.
Yesterday is Tomorrow in Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us
In Fatimah Asghar’s acclaimed 2018 debut, the past is the present is the future. History, particularly the traumatic history of diaspora, echoes deafeningly through the narrator’s present-day pain, joy, oppression, and affirmation.
The Transformative Magic of Reading Living Writers
Poetry reading isn’t increasing because people are rediscovering Edna St. Vincent Millay or Robert Hayden, though rediscoveries may be a happy byproduct of readers’ increased exposure to living writers.
The Power of a Woman’s Voice
Lilliet Berne, the orphan turned courtesan turned opera star who serves as the protagonist of Alexander Chee’s 2016 novel, embodies the complicated interchange of power and weakness that accompanies a woman’s silence.
Domestic Whimsy in Fascism’s Shadow
Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 novel is a record of a lost world and a lost way of life. Its insistently domestic narrative style, in its humanizing particularity, is also an act of resistance against the ascendant totalitarian ideologies looming over its characters’ lives.
Monique Wittig’s Language Beyond Gender
Reading Wittig as abstract (and using abstract as a means of being subtly anti-feminist) is misreading her: her whole point is to restore the body within the text.