criticism
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Danger Down Under: Fiona McFarlane’s Highway Thirteen
According to a website that calculates such things, the furthest city on the globe from my hometown in New York is Perth. Perth—I’ve heard of Perth.
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On Living Dangerously: Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions
We are once again living through an age when this fight over the purpose of storytelling, whose stories deserve to be heard, and how freely ideas should circulate is heated.
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“A Game of Chance You Can Choose to Play or Not”: On Lauren Russell’s A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close
[Russell] creates breathing room by breaking genre expectations, so that everything invisible swoops into stark relief.
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A Search for Country and Identity in Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography Of
It is Falomo’s legacy of rebirth, in rich, outstanding text, that there are things which must burn in order to be birthed anew
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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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Totally and Brutally Honest: Talking with Amanda Petrusich
Music critic Amanda Petrusich discusses DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE.
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Fresh Comics #12: Rolling Blackouts
Some books take such a mammoth effort to produce that it’s hard to want to be critical of them. Rolling Blackouts is one of those books. The nearly 300 pages of delicately crafted, watercolored panels make evident that Sarah Glidden is a…
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To Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with…