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Carmen Maria Machado’s critical work reflects wide-ranging interests, and some of her most exciting writing takes place in reviews of fiction that resembles her own—literature that is speculative, scary, and queer.
Behaving authentically in the world is never easy or straightforward; critics like William Gass show us, among many other things, that we are not alone in these questions of authenticity, and that we never really have been.
While hipness and ‘hipster-ness’ may not necessarily be the same thing, Lorentzen’s body of work has followed everything hip in the literary world with an anthropologist’s eye to ritual and an economist’s knowledge of market-driven systems.
Muhammad’s criticism is far-reaching, pulling together literature, politics, and religion in a quest to reckon with the black experience in modern America.
We misunderstand each other and we pull away. Even within one language like English, words mean different things to different people, and we gravitate towards those who use this meaning-making technology as we do. Some people struggle to differentiate between systemic issues and issues of personality. The quest for a purer communication continues.
In her memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression, New York writer Daphne Merkin calls herself “a poor little rich girl” before anyone else can; raised by philanthropist parents on Park Avenue, her financial privileges are plain.
It seems fitting that the title of Ozick’s latest book reads like a list or exercise in taxonomy: the book is rampant with clear-eyed perceptions and smooth digs, classic wit and a keen interest in dividing and categorizing, in speaking to the differences between things.
Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for theater criticism, Hilton Als often writes about the intersections of performativity, popular culture, and reflection—that is, the ways art can and cannot reflect something resembling truth. I first found my way to his writing through his book White Girls.
If you listen to NPR, you might vaguely recognize Maureen Corrigan’s voice. Even and deliberate, it always has an elusive quality: Corrigan’s book review segments on Fresh Air, usually ranging from five to eight minutes, are self-contained things, and every word feels carefully chosen.
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