Reviews

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

When I read Janice Lee’s novel Imagine a Death and Brenda Iijima’s book of poems Bionic Communality, I am awkward. I grope. I fidget. I wonder how to move. I […]

“I do not even understand why people read biography! They should just read the poems to understand Rich.” This impassioned, frustrated interjection by a friend was in response to Hilary […]