Critical Essays Archive
Kevin Young and the Age of Euphemism
In his eleventh book, Young recapitulates some of America’s most notorious humbugs, from P. T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Rachel Dolezal’s blackface. While his text primarily works to link the rise of hoaxes to “race and racialism,” Young also links this evolution
The Countryside as Escape Button
They sit on a bench outside their home, drinking wine and reading the paper, when Astrid steps inside to address a sleep-defying child. Instinctively, Thomas rises, walks out of their yard, and doesn’t return.
Creative Thinking in the Arts
To think creatively, to invent new things, to see new patterns, we need to turn things upside down, on their heads and have a fresh look.
Ugliness in Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that for most of my reading life, it never occurred to me that poetry could be anything other than beautiful.
Family Furnishings
“Family Furnishings,” like many great stories about family histories, is about finding our way to the truth through well-worn myths.
Girls in The Lucky Ones
The stories in Julianne Pachico’s debut collection The Lucky Ones are set in and out of Colombia, following the lives of a group of privileged students and their teachers amidst the country’s ongoing conflict.
Ballet, Loss, and Longing in The Complete Ballet
The Complete Ballet is a hybrid book, suggesting not only the format of a classical or romantic story ballet, but the sense that we can never answer Yeats’s question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” about the blurring of artist and performance, truth and fiction.
The Burden of Witness: The Sandcastle Girls, #MeToo, and The Armenian Genocide
On April 24, 2015 I was in Istanbul when the hundred-year commemorations of the start of the Armenian Genocide were taking place. A group of Armenians, Turks, and foreigners ended a walk to remember the massacre.
The Modernist Revision of a Foreign Culture in Ezra Pound’s Cathay
Pound, a white man who couldn’t speak or read a word of Chinese, was not even necessarily attempting to faithfully recreate Cathay’s poems in English; he rewrote the poems to fit into American modernist aesthetics, bringing ancient Chinese poetry into his own place and time.
The Story of a Text Conversation in Bury Me, My Love
The experiences we have through technology is something fiction has struggled with adapting but the recent phone game Bury Me, My Love captures the rhythm and suspense involved in waiting on a text in this story about a Syrian couple as one makes her way to Germany to seek