Reviews
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Against Aesthetic Beauty: Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters
. . . Elkin revisits works and experiences new ones, generating dialogues between them and their artists.
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In the Details: Don DeLillo’s Library of America volumes
In 1979, at the age of forty-two, the distinctly American writer Don DeLillo made a change that would have a profound impact on his work: he left the United States. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that year —his first accolade after…
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Gender Interrogations in Contemporary Queer Poetics: Six New Poetry Collections
How is poetic form being adapted, altered, and reimagined in contemporary lesbian and queer poetry? Five new poetry collections by lesbian, queer, and trans poets attend keenly to gender and systems surrounding it.
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In the Wilds of Magic: Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark
Despite the challenges presented by this novel’s wandering nature, Lispector’s stylistic feats enchants through to the end, and offers a compelling perspective on the wild magic of her voice.
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The Anger of Memory: Teju Cole’s Tremor
In this, Cole has taken the “tragedy” of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.
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Owning the Self: Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body
I only care about revolution / & the ugly business of revenge.
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A Literature for Lost Souls: Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound
Vasyakina powerfully encompasses the absurd and expansive universe of what Gogol described as the “unbridled incomprehensible Rus,” her homeland land with its terrors, its poetry and loftiness and its magic, to the skin and bones of the tender and violent…
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
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Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
THE LONG FORM reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
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The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays
Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners
Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
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Of Streets and Saints: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive and Theorem
Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.