Difficult Novels
There is something incredibly patronizing about “readability” being the exclusive domain of the “common reader,” and about the way it continues to inform aspects of literary criticism.
Critical Essays
Sherlock in Shanghai
How difficult is it for a story to move continents? One of Sherlock Holmes’ early Chinese translators, Cheng Xiaoqing, decided to find out, transplanting Sherlock Holmes from the foggy streets of nineteenth century London to his own Republic-era Shanghai.
Work, Love, and Partnership in Tove Jansson’s Fair Play
Jansson’s 1989 novel serves as a particularly poignant antithesis of the “loner artist” narrative, dealing instead with a loving partnership that, rather than getting in the way of artistic work, lifts and expands it.
The Criminal State in Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
Austin Reed’s 1858 book evades generic stability, blending memoir with picaresque, bildungsroman, jeremiad, and others to reveal the injustice of the justice system and the perpetuation of a criminal cycle as enforced by a racist state.
The Messiness of Resistance
Fumiko Enchi’s 1958 novel, 女面, grapples with women’s rage within a system that is structured to work against them, as well as the ways some women perform what is expected of them in order to usurp the system itself—with messy consequences.
Sparkling and Shade in Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable
In taking pains to detail both the glittering weddings and the modern questions that lie, unanswered, beneath those elite celebrations, Soniah Kamal’s new novel strives to show us a complicated social status.
Death in Literature: Predicted, Quantum, and All-Too-Human
Literature, as a territory of creative speculation, appears especially attuned to tracking our ever-evolving relationship to death and its consequences on how we lead our lives, how we relate to others, and how we cultivate any sort of moral compass.
Obsession and Celebrity in Laura Sims’ Looker
Laura Sims’ first novel considers what happens when infatuation, driven by depression and society’s subtly crushing expectations, is given room to fester into something closer to violent obsession.
The Secret History’s Fates, Allusions, and Tragedies
By making her first novel’s characters classicists, Donna Tartt lets us in on the trick: that this book is, in essence, a modern day Greek tragedy.