Reviews

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 both were committed to a mental hospital, where they knew …

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 work alongside another recent book, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays …

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 inside and outside mix, where architecture’s edges encounter climate, …

“Well, it was a sort of bet,” recalled Tom Phillips, decades later. “I was in a furniture shop with a friend, R. B. Kitaj, another artist, and I said, ‘the first book I can find for threepence, I will work …

Early in the pandemic, those of us raising school-aged children found them suddenly everywhere, all the time, closer than they’d been since infancy. It was as if my oldest child’s dark prophecy had come true: at five, after learning she’d …

Carrie Mae Weems’s 1997 photograph series Not Manet’s Type presents a series of nude self-portraits accompanied by text. The fourth image in the sequence shows Weems’s reflection in a round mirror sitting up in bed, partially covered in black lace …

Our toys are talking to us. Fulfilling the childhood fantasy of dolls that return affection, speak back, or even come to life, recent films have seized upon the timeless fascination with the secret lives of dolls and brought us as …

Elizabeth Arnold’s Wave House reveals a literary intelligence so fiercely independent and yet so central to my sense of contemporary literature that I’m tempted to use the book to stage my own little bastinado against a culture that rewards poetry …

In her debut novel, Jackal, Erin E. Adams begs readers to look at the horrors lurking behind the smiles of the residents of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the terrors hiding just in the corner of our eye. Through turning the …