Genre: Reviews

Who should tell the stories of people suffering under repressive political regimes such as the United States today? This may be one of the most fiercely debated questions of twenty-first-century literature. Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante’s newest book, which …

In her ground-breaking, best-selling book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun describes four ways to write a woman’s life: autobiography, fiction, biography, and an unnamed way in which “the woman may write her own life in …

Throughout his life’s work, John Koethe has elegized a romantic sense of meaning, that is, an illusory if highly desirous union with the larger universe. As we see throughout Walking Backwards, a collection spanning fifty years, his poems often …

The title of poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir about intergenerational migration derives from mythical insects that are said to inhabit the mountains of Mexico, tiny creatures with incandescent bodies and the faces of children. In Castillo’s telling, los Niños de …

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 …