Reviews

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s unfinished satire Black Snow, translated into English by Michael Glenny in 2005, a harried writer has the misfortune of having one of his novels picked up by the Independent Theatre, a legendary and mysterious Moscow institution …

Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, intimately follows first-person narrator Ro, who is stricken by grief. Ro works an entry-level job at an aquarium, despite freshly entering her thirties. She is adrift: estranged from her mother, their relationship is …

From an initial diagnosis of depression at nineteen, to the eventual diagnoses of multiple mental and physical illnesses in the two decades that followed, Jen Soriano has lived a lifetime of chronic pain. Her debut essay collection, Nervous: Essays on …

In the opening poem of Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph describes “the vehicle still leagues away from rescue.” She is telling us the story of her own traumatic brain injury, and she is giving us a version of …

There was a time when I hated the South and my white roots. That is, I felt ashamed of myself and my people. After moving away and returning, I now call the South home again, or home perhaps for the …

A. E. Stallings is celebrated as a poet of wit and wisdom. Her subjects are beauty and calamity, the acute present and the ancient past. Her poems are often unshakeable, straddling jest and oracularity in ageless lines ready-made for recitation. …

In “Coda: Stonington,” the poetic cap to the long first half of Dan Chiasson’s The Math Campers, a couple of stanzas and change flag us down:

In a book on one of the shelves
          I left a copy of …

Over the last twenty years, literary fiction has taken a fantastic turn. Jeanette Winterson is reanimating Mary Shelley, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are writing about robots, and everyone, it seems, is thinking about the apocalypse. But what purpose is …

K-pop idols are made, not born. In the popular boy band BTS’s 2017 hit single “DNA,” the seven members dance in bright pops of neon, tangling and untangling their arms in a pulsating formation that mimics a double helix structure. …