Articles by Emily Colette Wilkinson
September 23, 2011
Can Sexual Violence in Movies Be Edifying? From Straw Dogs to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 14
The experience, whatever the intellectual payoff, is inevitably tinged with a feeling of troubling complicity: Am I self-hating? A pervert? Does having gotten something out of that movie make me “a bad person”?
June 29, 2011
The Devil in a Cadillac: Langston Hughes’ Tambourines to Glory 0
This is a living book—one that summons the age of the Great Migration and Sarah Vaughan and Joe Louis. And while it’s a morality fable, its characters aren’t the flat allegorical kind.
May 13, 2011
I Was A Teenage Grave Robber: Daniel Kraus’s Rotters 0
Lest you fail to detect the skeleton of historical fact that gives shape to Daniel Kraus’s unsettling, baroque, and surpassingly lurid new young adult novel, Rotters, I begin this review with a short history of the resurrection men, vulgarly referred to as grave robbers or body snatchers.
April 21, 2011
American Laurels: The Poets Laureate Anthology 4
As a volume in the cultural history of American poetry, there’s no doubt that Elizabeth Hun Schmidt’s The Poets Laureate Anthology is a valuable text. For starters, it’s the only book of its kind.
March 9, 2011
A Beginner’s Guide to Drugs For Girls 4
Tasteless and horrifying–nay, even a sign of the apocalypse–or rather excellent advice for college-bound young ladies? You decide: Vice Magazine‘s “A Beginner’s Guide to Drugs For Girls.” (A taste: “Here are some pointers for the beginners out there so you can get high without becoming that girl slumped in the corner of the night bus [...]
February 28, 2011
James M. Cain’s Serenade: Fate and Blindness 11
Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for Cain’s fast, lean, hit-the-ground-running story-telling — talk as straight and sharp as a machete blade and twice as likely to leave you sore, since Noir heroes never end well–but it’s also that the Noir hero sees so much, narrates and describes what he sees so meticulously, and yet fails to see the destruction that awaits him.