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David Treuer on the Myth of an Edenic, Pre-Columbian ‘New’ World
When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas in 1492, and when Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot in English) landed on the mainland of North America in 1497, they arrived in a vast land, but also in an equally vast...
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What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath
Many biographies of Sylvia Plath end with the author making a visit to her grave. They are largely grim accounts. Paul Alexander, in his controversial biography Rough Magic, describes a barren place on...
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On the Overlooked Eroticism of Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver is often called a nature poet, but she might more accurately be described as a poet of attention. In this, one specific aspect of her work is often overlooked: her eroticism. Oliver wrote...
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Lessons From a Newly-Discovered Sylvia Plath Story
Nearly twenty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her New York Times review of Sylvia Plath’s Unabridged Journals that the book was Plath’s “presumed final posthumous publication.” Given that Plath...
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Deconstructing Old Stories to Tell Them in New Ways
About four years ago, I started to write a novel. I knew very little about it besides that I wanted it to be a contemporary retelling of Oedipus. All writing, I suppose, is a form of retelling but more...
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When Even the Greatest of Writers Grapples with Self-Doubt
Months before his death in 1939, W. B. Yeats found himself at a crisis point. He was writing many poems; at the same time, he was afraid that he had become a kind of fraud, an impostor, lifelessly...
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Writing Absurdity in Zimbabwe’s Contemporary Dystopia
There were things I must have known growing up but whose significance I wasn’t aware of: that, for instance, this woman I called my mother, with her Dark n Lovely perm and her Yvonne Chaka Chaka smile...
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In Search of the Surreal at the Leonora Carrington Museum
In the courtyard of the Leonora Carrington Museum at Centro de las Artes in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, a large bird captain steers the bird passengers of his bird boat across a lake. The arts complex...
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The Coded Queer Lives of a Hollywood Classic
“The Cat’s in the Bag, the Bag’s in the River” What were we meant to be feeling at the movies in the 1950s on hearing a line like this? What do we feel now? What is this insinuating rumor about the...
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On Danticat, Camus, and the Art of Exile
“Create dangerously,” the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat famously wrote in her 2010 nonfiction collection of the same name, “for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant...
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A Brief History of Guantanamo Bay, America’s “Idyllic Prison Camp”
One day, our dispatch-boat found the shores of Guantánamo Bay flowing past on either side. It was at nightfall, and on the eastward point a small village was burning, and it happened that a fiery light...
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Empathy Exams: On Fictionalizing Extremists
To read the news is to immerse oneself in the lives and deeds of extremists. Whether that extremism takes the form of violent religious fanaticism or neo-Nazis agitating in the streets, it’s an...
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31 Books in 30 Days: Victoria Chang on Diane Seuss
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC...
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31 Books in 30 Days: Marion Winik on Lawrence Wright
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC...
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In Praise of the Difficult: On Marianne Moore, Defiant Poet of Complexity
In “Feeling and Precision,” a contemplative essay by the Modernist poet Marianne Moore from 1944, she argued—in a sense—against the claims that her famously difficult and opaque poems were lacking in...
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31 Books in 30 Days: Anjali Enjeti on Erika Meitner
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists....
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31 Books in 30 Days: Marion Winik on Nicole Chung
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC...
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On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist
With the publication of Swann’s Way on November 14th, 1913, Marcel Proust found immediate fame. In the weeks that followed publication, a number of laudatory reviews appeared. Lucien Daudet, in a long...
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31 Books in 30 Days: Katherine A. Powers on Craig Brown
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists....
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The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is not a particularly easy book to read. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad, or that books that are easier to read are bad. It is just a fact—it demands extra...
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