Bridget Jones’s Anxiety

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel uses the journal format for its intense relatability, leading to a claustrophobic portrayal of the intrusive nature of societal expectations that never lets up, even when its heroine finds herself pulled into madcap office romances and a time-share embezzlement scheme.

Authorial and Historical Absence in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Michelle McNamara’s authorial absence mirrors the lack of emotional closure in the case of the Golden State Killer, both in the historical moment when her book was being composed and the perpetrator was still unidentified, and post-conviction, when comprehension still remains out of reach.

The Artist as Writer

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
In 1973, Kusama Yayoi returned to Japan from New York and began experimenting with poetry and fiction.

The Depth of Memory in Nona Fernández’s Voyager

The essays in Fernández’s collection weave from the personal to the profound, from the historical to the mystical, from the scientific to the spiritual. The book has one fundamental message: to hold the past is what makes us human.

Capitalism, Racism, and Misogyny in Natasha Brown’s Assembly

Brown’s debut novel is a slow-motion tragedy, all the weight of four hundred years coming to bear on one woman and the heartbreaking clarity with which she narrates exactly what that feels like. It is a story of all the ways capitalism, racism, and misogyny inflict violence on the

On Be Holding

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Ross Gay’s book-length poem suggests that within the horror show of objectified Black pain and the not-finished history of stolen Black bodies, the answer is a community that holds each other with care and beholds in Black lives not just suffering but life, dignity, complexity—and joy.

Courage and Craft in Wanting: Women Writing About Desire

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
The contributors to Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters’s new anthology risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it a collection that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, but also between wanting and voice.

Dreams and Death in Karisma Price’s I’m Always So Serious

Price’s poems often play with dreams, with alternate realities. Price writes about these dreams, these alternate realities, by using metaphor, by making lists, in which one person, one object, one thought, lives different realities. Love poems here have the names of the dead. Poems repeatedly turn serious.

Constant Contradictions in Nazlı Koca’s The Applicant

Author: | Categories: Book Reviews, Fiction No comments
With its clipped, direct sentences and its abundance of resonant questions, long and short, Koca’s prose mirrors this narrative doubleness—giving readers an experience that is both irresistibly consumable yet compellingly durable.

The Century’s Quiet Crises

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
With her third collection, out last week, Éireann Lorsung’s ambition is clear: to conduct a historical audit in poetry of the points of history her life touches.