Je Nathanaël’s Self-Translation
Despite our attempts to capture the body with language and understand it as a unified whole that is closed off and divided against the world, we are not whole, nor are we closed.
Critical Essays
The Subtle Violence of Weldon Kees’s Poetry
Weldon Kees’s poetry spans a variety of forms, and the poems similarly include such a scattering of voices that you might not think they were written by the same person. But in the poems we also find a characteristic that unifies his work—a kind of sneaky violence.
Marriage and The Islands
Stories in Dionne Irving’s new collection suggest that sometimes a person might wish to be an island, to slough off from the mainland and stake out a claim of space for themselves. Irving’s narrators insist that sometimes vows have run their course, and there’s no greater freedom than letting go.
The Literary History of Morgan le Fay
Few witches in literary history have been as influential—or as maligned—as Morgan le Fay. To understand Morgan le Fay is thus to understand something of the nature of witches’ and witchcraft’s literary representation as a whole.
Matters of the Sea / Cosas del mar and the Gulf between Homes
“Every time I go to Cuba, I spend the first moments after I’m settled walking over to El Malecon and sitting by the sea.”
Inciting Joy’s Communion
The fundamental thesis of Ross Gay’s new collection may be that joy, along with its cousins gratitude and delight, is itself political: not only do various experiences incite joy, but joy itself incites connection and even something like an ethic of care, a movement toward justice.
Weasels in the Attic’s Exploration of Parenthood
The newest book by Hiroko Oyamada, published in English translation by David Boyd earlier this month, teems with tropical fish and its eponymous weasels, whose lives and deaths reveal the precariousness of parenthood and family.
The Haunted House of Lucy Wood’s Weathering
Haunted houses are liminal spaces by design, the boundary between life and afterlife blurred and the line between truth and imagination called into question within. But the most effective haunted houses in literature blur even more lines—between past and present, and memory and reality.
Becoming One’s Mother: Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy
Devastatingly, Tove Ditlevsen’s three-part memoir suggests that acquiring a room of one’s own and becoming a successful writer does not preclude sharing the fate of one’s mother.