Critical Essays Archive
The Small Tragedies of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children
9/11 is the catalyst to launch the characters of Claire Messud’s 2006 novel from their delayed adolescence into the sobriety and cynicism of adulthood among New York’s intellectual elite.
Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men and Red Pill Reductionism
During the final years of Obama's presidency, Zuckerberg hoped her new book, in shedding light on how the Internet’s “manosphere” abused ancient texts, might expand how scholars of the classics study contemporary uses of the ancient world. Then, a few days after submitting her first draft, Donald Trump was
Queerness in Everyday People: The Color of Life
Alexander Chee, Dennis Norris II, and Brandon Taylor, each in their own literary style, paint queerness as an out-of-body experience.
Womanhood in A. E. Stallings’ Like
In Stallings’ new collection of poetry, women are immersed in what it means to be a mother, and to see oneself growing older.
Anne Garréta and the Grammar of Desire
The initial image of the sphinx in Garréta’s first novel seems to haunt the project of each of her subsequent books: a chimera-like assemblage of parts (the exact composition of which can vary) that remains enigmatic, that resists understanding.
Disappearing Distinctions in Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest
With rich, corporeal symbolism, Rivera Garza not only demonstrates how gender classification and the language that serves it disappear marginalized voices from literature and marginalized bodies from the world, but also asks how this tiered disappearance might be tempered.
Silence in Poetry
Three recent collections of poetry do justice to the complex relationship between silence, narrative, and the tacit relationships out of which language is born.
Language and the Algorithm
Is writing really anything more than rearranging words?
Maxim Loskutoff’s Exploration of the American Northwest
As with one’s family, Loskutoff has a complicated relationship with the Northwest, one that cannot be reduced to a single definition such as “love” or “hate.” He is mixed up in this wild country, both as an insider Montana native and as an outsider.
The Shifting Literary and Ecological Landscapes of Renee Gladman’s Calamities
Renee Gladman’s book occupies the intersection of the novel, poem, and work of nonfiction. It also spans a familiar world that is now shifting—an Anthropocentric world in the midst of its own calamities.