Criticism & Features

It’s been thirty-three years since the accident at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, and despite millions in relief funding, extensive local research and the collapse of the Soviet Union,

Which tradition? Whose? Jericho Brown presses these questions continually in the slender, subtle, wry, and beautiful lyric poems of The Tradition – but almost never in ways a reader might

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is about the radical sexualities and the aesthetics of waywardness that young black women introduced into early twentieth-century American life. While key cultural figures

The “welfare queen” meme was built on a myth that Josh Levin takes to its gnarly, contradictory origins in his lucid and engaging The Queen. The euphemism was often associated

The central question at the heart of Laura Cumming’s book is what happened when her mother, at age three, was taken away from her parents on an English beach one

Edwidge Danticat has been one of America’s most vital authors of fiction since the publication of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994. In her work, she’s explored themes

No matter who you are, or what you have read before, I can guarantee you that you have not read anything like Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic. To say that you “read”

In a foreword to his sprawling, insightful examination of the challenges faced by three generations of gay men in the U.S., Odets writes that aside from his primary intended audience—gay

Having reclaimed the three Bronte sisters from 150 years of reinvention and misconception in the superb “The Bronte Myth” (2001), Lucasta Miller now retrieves L.E.L., the once celebrated poet, Letitia

Mary Ruefle’s book of poems, Dunce, like all of her books, is like no other. I carry around her book of prose, Madness, Rack, and Honey as if it were