Power and Obsession in Devotion
The scale of privilege constantly shifts in Madeline Stevens’ debut novel, fostering a lethal combination of gratitude, jealousy, and resentment within its protagonist.
Critical Essays
-
-
The Desire of Girls in Machine
Rather than being a juvenile or simplistic depiction of desire as purely a physical impulse for the adolescent narrator, Susan Steinberg’s first novel presents desire in the mind of an adolescent girl as a larger force, one that is as much existential as it is universal.
-
Bipolar Disorder and the Pills that Keep Us Alive
For bipolar disorder, the most tried and true treatment—the most effective one—doesn’t come from a lab; it comes from stardust. It’s an element on the periodic table, atomic number 3.
-
Writing Racist Characters
There are uniquely white stories that all white people know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.
-
Imagination and the American West
Carys Davies’ debut novel reveals that mythologies often arise from foolish beginnings but that the elevated stories that emerge are no less valuable.
-
The Poetry in Footnotes, Endnotes, Annotations, & Bibliographies
In new collections by Marwa Helal, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Chaun Webster, we find rich archives of ideas and texts that hold within them visions of a future where people can fly and where people can also stay to flourish in the place they call home.
-
Supreme’s Co-Optation of Barbara Kruger’s Oeuvre
If Supreme is recognized for Barbara Kruger’s iconic messages, is the brand co-opting and altering her words, thus changing Kruger’s rhetorical impact on an audience? What is the rhetorical purpose behind Kruger’s work?
-
Shame, Shamelessness, and Violence
Salman Rushdie’s fantastical 1983 novel explores and illustrates the slippery relationship between shame and violence—when accumulated, the former often leads to the latter.
-
James Joyce and Rebecca Lee’s Dinner Party Revelations
In fiction, it is never a good idea to attend a dinner party. We read dinner party stories to get messy, to get everybody drunk, and to hear what they’ve been keeping quiet about for years. These fictional parties almost always end in a revelation, and usually not a happy one.
