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.
Critical Essays
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.
How the United States Nurtures Violence
While the characters of Laila Lalami’s newest novel confront and sometimes overcome the discomfort caused by their differences, Lalami presents one final troubling question for her readers: what markers of violence have our willingly blind eyes allowed to fester?
The American Dream in The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
Lucette Lagnado’s 2007 memoir is a testament to the difficulties that are so inherent to the immigration process that even a family of people who are educated, upper-class, and well-off experience them.
Memory and Heartbreak in To The River
While Olivia Laing’s 2011 book is a remarkable piece of nature writing, it is, at its core, a book about a heart mending itself and the unwieldiness of memory.
The Uncannily Foreign World of Westside
Reading W.M. Akers’ debut novel is a magnificent experience, but it is uncomfortable, to say the least—the world it depicts, a 1921 version of Manhattan, is not so unfamiliar after all. As fantasy novels often do, the book offers a disturbing allegory for our times.
The Dissolution of Absolutes en La Frontera
Gabino Iglesias’s recent novel revolves around multiple characters journeying through la frontera, the border between the United States/Mexico. In each of the characters’ stories, however, there are multiple journeys being made, multiple borders being crossed, and as their stories progress, what they’re striving for is less and less clear.
The Lives of Others in Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City
What is to be made of the myriad tales collected in this anthology, some of them connected by geographical proximity and nothing more? Part of the effect is to render the familiar unfamiliar.
The Nearness of the Moon
Italo Calvino’s work reminds us that curiosity itself is a kind of gravity, a pull that is difficult to understand or measure and yet is instinctively, unavoidably felt.