Reviews

Image and Appropriation: On Lynne Tillman’s ‘Men and Apparitions’

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Tillman is not asking how should a person be or how does the world look, but rather, how does a person become? And how do images complicate these notions of ourselves and this desire to become someone else?
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Reviews

The Affliction of Identity: Chelsey Johnson’s ‘Stray City’

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In an ideal world, just as we would allow writers’ work to speak for itself, so would we allow queer women to the be the arbiters of their own identities and experiences.
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Reviews

The Unforgotten: On Michael W. Twitty’s ‘The Cooking Gene’

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White families may often be able to trace their lineage back several hundred years with impunity, without ever noticing what a privilege such a record can be.
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Reviews

Father Figures: On Armistead Maupin’s ‘Logical Family’

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Tensions between romance and loyalty and blood and true affinity run through Tales of the City, but Maupin leaves them sadly unexamined when discussing his own life.
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Reviews

Displaced and Replaced Sisters: On Leslie Pietrzyk’s ‘Silver Girl’

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Silver Girl is not really a coming-of-age novel. It’s not such a simple or insignificant book that it can be shunted into the pigeonhole of a particular genre and set aside to go quietly out of print.
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Reviews

Myths and Fables: On Sexual Violence in Fiona Mozley’s ‘Elmet’

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As horrifying as our discovery of sexual violence is, even more so is our disbelief of it, our willingness to push it into the same mythical distance as the rest of Mozley’s allegory.
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Reviews

Unchecked Complacency and Privilege: On Prayaag Akbar’s ‘Leila’

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Read as political and social allegory, Leila is a powerful commentary on the inherently unstable foundations that India’s societal setup rests upon, where progress predicated on economic growth has led to widening economic inequality.
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Reviews

Self-Discovery and the Limitations of Literature: On ‘Call Me Zebra’

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Literature is her inheritance, and literature educates her about the pointlessness of a cruel world.
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Reviews

The Outcome of Leila Slimani’s ‘The Perfect Nanny’ Can Only Be Disastrous

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Whenever a character makes light of the horror, you know something awful is afoot.
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Reviews

A Small Flame in the Dark: On Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Go, Went, Gone’

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Erpenbeck's mastery of language and image ripples through her pages. Her prose is so controlled and flowing. Her chapters are compact lessons in form and function, some long, most short, all well-contained.
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Reviews

László Krasznahorkai’s ‘The World Goes On’ Stands in Defiance to Its Own Despair

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For Krasznahorkai, plot and all the logistics it demands generally step aside to let the story’s mania occupy the reader’s attention.
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Reviews

Christine Angot’s ‘Incest’ Is a Radical Act of Confession

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Submitting to the logic (or illogic) of Angot’s world ultimately gives the thrilling sense of having melded with another consciousness.
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Reviews

Double Binds: On Morgan Jerkins’s ‘This Will Be My Undoing’

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Failure—damned if you do, damned if you don’t—is built into the double bind of black womanhood.
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Reviews

‘Parallel Botany’ in the Age of Alternative Facts

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Parallel Botany uniquely suited for rereading in the age of the Trump administration’s "alternative facts," as it spans the gap between art and science, showing how disregard for the truth equally imperils both the studio and the laboratory.
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Reviews

In Defense of Discomfort: On Naivo’s ‘Beyond the Rice Fields’

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Beyond the Rice Fields is an important read: amidst a tradition of deference, a story of colonization is told from the point of view of the colonized.
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Reviews

The Stories of James McBride

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McBride’s fantastical surrealism expands the possibility for readers to consider the meaning of freedom in a mess of complex capitalist, racial, and religious dynamics.
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Reviews

Will the Internet Destroy Us All? On Franklin Foer’s ‘World Without Mind’

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The Big One—"the inevitable mega-hack that will rumble society to its core"—will have the potential to bring down our financial infrastructure, deleting fortunes and 401Ks in the blink of an eye and causing the kind of damage to our material infrastructure that could lead to death.
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Reviews

Things Fall Apart: On Ali Smith’s ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’

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Can art light up anything? If we’re in the worst of times, can things only get better?
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