Reviews

“ ‘Communication’ is a registry of modern longings,” writes media theorist John Durham Peters in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. “The term evokes a utopia […]

The opening pages of Lindsey Harding’s Pilgrims 2.0 introduce a world that is familiar, but slightly off-kilter. A cruise ship is being prepared to set sail, only the purpose of […]

Today in China the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square are a taboo subject. They’re not taught in textbooks or memorialized in museums. Many young people don’t even know about […]

Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise (recently released in paperback), is populated by people who hold back—people who have made a tactic of restraint so that they might harbor […]

In February, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs held its annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Like so many writers with a first book newly published, I wanted to […]

A trace is a small, but non-negligible amount of a thing implying a larger amalgam of it elsewhere. A trace is a presence, however miniscule, that points away from itself […]

Cheat with the wrong woman, and you may find a bunny boiling in your kitchen. Such is the enduring legacy of 1987’s Fatal Attraction and fount of the shorthand for […]

Both of Alison Rumfitt’s novels open with a content warning. As well as flagging potentially distressing material, these warnings function as upfront statements of Aboutness. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is […]

I keep fighting off awareness that my imaginative life has been stuck in a rut for a long time. When one dismisses specific contemporary volumes of poetry, one can blame […]

Scene 1 A small, stuffy bedroom in a boardinghouse called the Palace, window thrown open to the desert night. Two men have reunited after meeting nearly a decade ago when […]

I begin this review of Kazim Ali’s latest book, Sukun: New and Selected Poems, while attempting to process the daily news coming out of Palestine. I am thinking of Ali’s […]

In the first chapter of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Charlie Hailey defines the porch as a place of meeting and exchange: “Porch is that place where […]