Reviews

Jay Wright’s new collection, The Prime Anniversary, begins with a wedding song for the lost. Borrowing from the Sapphic fragment ὦ καλή, ὦ χαρίεσσα (“o beautiful, o graceful”), its epigraph apostrophizes absence and begins a ceremony whose actors wait …

Andrew Zawacki’s latest poetry collection, Unsun, refracts recurring interests in sunlight and perception as a way of making visible our slow-going collective disaster. The nature of this disaster is manifold: the disaster of parenting in the midst of climate …

Jeanette Winterson’s new novel, Frankissstein, is a lively homage to the biotechnological future first made thinkable in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is one in a long series of remakes and commentaries that equate “Frankenstein” with biotechnological developments such …

When characterizing the fiction of Ivan Turgenev in a review of Constance Garnett’s translation of The Two Friends and Other Stories for The Times Literary Supplement in December 1921, Virginia Woolf—as consummate a critic as she was a novelist—describes a …

The New York Times published an op-ed by Martin Scorsese on 4 November 2019, a few days after The Irishman, his eagerly awaited motion picture, had opened in restricted theatrical release and about three weeks before the film would …

Jesse Ball’s 2018 novel Census at first seems determined to use the title’s subject—an official count of the citizens throughout an unnamed land—as mere background. Ball’s nameless narrator works as a census taker, but feels little urgency about the task, …

Opposite the title page of Sarah Gambito’s third book, Loves You, is printed a black-and-white photo, circa 1985, I ’d guess. Eight people, mostly women, are perched on seats or stand around in a living room, balancing plates of …

Leslie Jamison has established herself as one of the most eloquent contemporary writers of the personal essay. Make It Scream, Make It Burn, her latest book, investigates the ethical difficulties of the relationship between writer and subject. While Jamison’s …

In the Lateness of World, Carolyn Forché’s first poetry volume to appear in almost two decades, derives its title from line fourteen of Robert Duncan’s “Poetry, a Natural Thing.” Denise Levertov, some of whose finest poems vigorously protested U.S. intervention …