Criticism
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On Inheritance: Maureen Sun’s The Sisters K
By recasting this Slavophile opus as a critique of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, with a grand sense of philosophical rigor, Sun models anti-imperial engagement with the Russian canon.
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Please Please Please: Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing
Few romance novels hit such emotional and sensual highs with the leads physically apart; fewer still so elegantly capture the fluid contours of gender and desire.
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Slant Panes of Light: Emilie Menzel’s The Girl Who Became a Rabbit
Meaning is fleeting. Meaning is self-made.
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Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
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The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work.