Reviews

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 […]

In the opening poem of Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph describes “the vehicle still leagues away from rescue.” She is telling us the story of her own traumatic brain […]

There was a time when I hated the South and my white roots. That is, I felt ashamed of myself and my people. After moving away and returning, I now […]

A. E. Stallings is celebrated as a poet of wit and wisdom. Her subjects are beauty and calamity, the acute present and the ancient past. Her poems are often unshakeable, […]

In “Coda: Stonington,” the poetic cap to the long first half of Dan Chiasson’s The Math Campers, a couple of stanzas and change flag us down: In a book on […]

Over the last twenty years, literary fiction has taken a fantastic turn. Jeanette Winterson is reanimating Mary Shelley, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are writing about robots, and everyone, it […]

K-pop idols are made, not born. In the popular boy band BTS’s 2017 hit single “DNA,” the seven members dance in bright pops of neon, tangling and untangling their arms […]

In 2004, the trans theorist Eva Hayward began studying a species of marine invertebrate, the orange cup coral, or Balanophyllia elegans. Hayward wasn’t a biologist, but a PhD student in […]