Reviews

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The subtitle of Peach Pit makes it clear what this fiction anthology promises: an array of portrayals of “unsavory” women who misbehave, who refuse to fit into the neat tropes […]

Stephanie Burt’s sixth poetry collection, We Are Mermaids, touches on the surface of things and slips below into the saltiest depths and touches there too. Poems discuss the ways letters touch each […]

               “I’m not famous now. But just wait until I’m dead!”                            […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]