Reviews

In 2004, the trans theorist Eva Hayward began studying a species of marine invertebrate, the orange cup coral, or Balanophyllia elegans. Hayward wasn’t a biologist, but a PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at University of California, Santa …

When a man is murdered in small-town Texas, the town’s Ethiopian diasporic community convenes to decide where to lay his body to rest. The decision makers, dubbed the Elders, must choose whether to bury him in his country of birth—Ethiopia—or …

In the Odyssey, Circe promises her famed traveler to “set him a course,” and throughout the short-story collection Are We Ever Our Own Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes offers this same gift to her readers. Fuentes proves an adept cartographer as …

1.

In a 1995 letter to Belle Randall, Thom Gunn writes, “I’d say that the canon emerges largely through luck—the luck of posterity . . . Of course, I don’t rate LUCK or POSTERITY any more highly than you . …

When W. H. Auden visited wartime Shanghai with Christopher Isherwood in 1938, they took breaks from “their social consciences” to frequent a bathhouse where they were “erotically soaped and massaged by young men”:

You could pick your attendants, and many …

The Worst Incident in the History of Motorsport

Circuit de la Sarthe
Le Mans, France, 1955

It’s a perfect June day, which maybe explains the turnout. Nearly 300,000 record-setting souls in attendance. Everyone’s packed in wherever they can fit, all …

Y’all, the strangest thing has happened: suddenly I’m trendy? Or rather, where I’m from is trendy. Appalachia, especially its art and music, is having a moment. The chaos of the 2020s has left Americans collectively bereft, uneasy, hungry for authenticity. …

Marcel Duchamp coined the term readymade in 1916 and used it to describe prefabricated, mass-produced objects that the artist chooses and isolates from their intended uses, thereby elevating them to the status of art. What Ander Monson blurbs of CORRECTION…

Lisa Hsiao Chen’s first novel, Activities of Daily Living, is about the importance of maintaining some sort of life practice or “project.” In the midst of the personal loss and signs of quietus that punctuate everyday life, our projects …