Withdrawn into his tower, pacing the crumbling battlements as he waits to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, Coetzee has given himself over fully to arid intellectual games.

Perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style.

Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches. 

The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.

What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?

By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology.

What Mobility offers is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context.

Hard at work in a culture more dedicated to vocational mythologizing than repairing structural supports.

Palacios’ lyrics carefully excavate, document, and interpellate through such questions, interrogating what a peopled coexistence could possibly mean when, amidst modern exigencies.

I feel jealous of Toby Altman for being so obsessed with this topic, which makes his poetry a “serious project.” I worry I am only serious about my love for people.

Running through “There’s Always This Year” is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book.

By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals.

It is both within the custom of writerly sight, then, and a cruel irony, that Berger, whose popularity is most connected to Ways of Seeing, would later come to develop cataracts in both eyes.

Style is sexy, but without its earthly trappings—the meaty, earthy details that give texture and life to a novel—it floats away as soon as the book is shut.

Armen Davoudian’s first full-length book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, shows for the first time in far too long what meters and rhymes and inherited forms, used deftly and clearly to speak of real lives, can do.

If you are deeply offended by Bratton’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s historical masterworks into a novel about incest, addiction, and fucking, consider what he was up against.

To do so would call into question the political viability of Bertram’s poetic practice, which is stuck at the level of the model, taking it as a given and merely tweaking the parameters.

Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience.

From this angle, it’s almost as if the narrative itself—an ethereal ghost story and a cautionary tale about land grabs—is inconsequential to the book’s real currency: its paradoxically prominent underappreciation.

The Ryders are an antithesis of an aristocratic dynasty, closer to modern-day rednecks than the ancestral tradition Barnes pays homage to in her Elizabethan prose.