Genre: Reviews

Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is not a book that asks to be liked—at least, not by adults. Adult readers are, after all, just more of those adults who wander through the novel’s pages, telling …

In his 1923 book Spring and All, William Carlos Williams declares that “either to write or to comprehend poetry the words must be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack of it which …

In a decade of reading and writing about motherhood poetry—including an essay-review in these pages in 2019—I have found no universal truths about motherhood. However, as I’ve worked with poet Nancy Reddy to edit an …

We are all, in this pandemic, a living elegy; there are loves, possibilities, selves, ways of life that are dead, a mobile mortality poets have always known and used their art to reckon with, fool around with, and renovate: enter …

Grace Elizabeth Hale, a historian at the University of Virginia, is the author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1995) and A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion …

How does one either narrate or deconstruct the story, and the crafting, of the “self” when the premises of narrative and of the existence of (human) being eclipse Black people by a paradigm underwritten by gratuitous violence? Put differently, how …

By now the divide is clear: it looks like the same divide that bedevils prose fiction, or did until recently. Comics and graphic novels get framed as serious literature, if they’re accomplished enough, but only if they seem to portray …

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 …