book review

Amy Berkowitz on her new book Gravitas, the graduate school gauntlet, and collective poetry experiments.

In Mattie Lubchansky’s new graphic novel, Boys Weekend, the stag celebration achieves its final, and fatal, form.

Acree Macam reflects on the murder of Tortuguita, activist parents and children, and Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts

In his column, Jonathan Russell Clark re-examines the work of Ted Chiang, using it as a lens through which to understand today’s AI discourse.

Punk! Real estate! Venice Beach! Myriam Gurba re-introduces readers to Kate Braverman’s cult classic Lithium for Medea.

Columnist Jonathan Russell Clark proves that sometimes, the best biographers can’t stand their subjects.

In Jonathan Russell Clark’s latest column, he writes about Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York and tries to summon some love for Colombus, Ohio.

Miah Jeffra reviews Cheryl Klein's fertility and cancer memoir "Crybaby", an exploration of cancer, fertility, eating disorder, queer desire, and the self.

In 1954 Sylvia Wright, an editor at Harper’s Magazine, wrote a piece for the magazine in which she recalls her childhood. Her mother would read the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray” to her. Here is how young Wright heard the opening lyric: Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They […]

In his book "The Nineties", Chuck Klosterman is not interested in what’s conventionally understood or easily graspable but in the layers that either exist deep underneath or hover loftily. It’s what makes his essays and books so fun—it allows us to reconsider accepted wisdom.

This imagined town in North Carolina, where all of Kenan’s stories take place, is home to preachers, farmers, Black and white people, the rich and poor. In this town lives a queer Black boy, Horace Cross, whose life is being shrunk by the social boundaries delimiting his desire, the same machinations of shame and disregard that turn many young Black queer people into ghosts of themselves.

I first did mushrooms with a green-haired mermaid. It was Halloween, we were at an off campus party, and the sea creature invited me to climb into the back of her Bronco with these magic words: “I love your work.” By “work,” she meant the diary entries I posted online, which were mostly about cigarettes […]

Through personal narrative, journalist, survivor, and activist Shiori Ito examines rape culture in Japan.

The most interesting mystery novels don’t announce themselves as such. There is no murder to solve or culprit to apprehend. Rather, events which have no obvious explanation unfold and an air of ambiguity surrounds them. Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division belongs to this category of mystery.

I could go on and on about these collaborations, but I don’t have enough space here to describe how wonderfully, gloriously, and lovingly enthralling they are. There are poems about birth and the body, stories of misogyny at a university and of grappling with a miscarriage. These works explore heritage, family, gender, love, and in the case of the inimitable Diane Seuss, tits. Altogether, they typify the robust state of contemporary poetry.