We Were Strike and Instrument Both: Music and Queerness in Edinburgh
Alexander Chee’s first novel utilizes song as a discovery space for the body, giving insight into how the main character, Fee, understands his sexuality.
Critical Essays
The Possibilities Born of Spinsterhood in The Blue Castle and Now, Voyager
In both L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel and Irving Rapper’s 1942 film, self-knowledge is a powerful diagnostic tool that needs to be harnessed to decision making in order to affect lasting change. Both works subsequently insist on the validity of their heroines’ choices.
What Is Social Media Doing to Us?
Dave Eggers’ 2021 novel, through a demonstration of the real-life consequences of the proliferation of social media behaviors, paints a dire picture of the future, in which concern quickly becomes panic, and uninterrupted conversations are rare.
Asian American Inscrutability in Joan is Okay
Like Weike Wang’s vision of fiction, in grief Joan discovers that inscrutability can be possibility itself.
Either/Or’s Aesthetic Questioning
In Elif Batuman’s new novel, Selin is trying to figure out how to narrate love, how to make it make narrative sense; on the way, she figures out what love and novels have to do with each other.
The Pleas of Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet
Niyi Osundare’s newest collection of poetry lets the earth speak. He shows us how the planet is ailing via the direct address and the personification of the environment, forcing us to consider how we might help protect Earth from those who are killing it.
The Remarkable Staying Power of Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables
Perhaps what is most striking about Hisaye Yamamoto’s stories is how easily they could be written by a Japanese American author today, though many of them were written over fifty years ago, so focused are they on issues of race and the gendered expectations of women that still exist.
Women and Violence in Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020 Beowulf translation works to center the lives and voices of women—a move that dramatically changes its handling of violence and trauma.
Preparation for the Next Life’s Accumulation of Stories
Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel is a book with many stories piled up inside it, its personalities, with their long and painful histories, bumping and crashing into each other in the present. It is a love story that rarely uses the word love.