Criticism

How Mike Kelley Became Himself

The artist’s search for subcultural America
Jonathan Griffin
Books

The Polycrisis

Why can’t we stop talking about nonmonogamy?
Brandy Jensen

Is Blasphemy Illiberal?

Salman Rushdie’s thoroughly modern controversies
Len Gutkin

Poetically Speaking

A new book makes the case for bewilderment as a critical virtue
Brian Dillon

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware

Chantal Akerman’s Elusive Interiors

What the filmmaker’s portrayal of women reveals—and withholds
Emily LaBarge

Browse

Criticism

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois
Madhu H. Kaza
June 28, 2021
New York Times Cover reading "US Deaths near 100,000, an incalculable loss
Books

Incalculable Loss

How writing can help make sense of grief
Christopher Spaide
May 19, 2021
Corgi jumping from floating dock into water after a tennis ball with great abandon

It Me

The trouble with memes
Marta Figlerowicz
May 19, 2021
Men in an airport lounge
Books

Olga Tokarczuk’s Radical Tenderness

Reading the Nobel winner's oeuvre
Marek Makowski
February 16, 2021
Still from Pen15, a television show
Television

Act Your Age

Swapping bodies, swapping ages, and re-inventing youth
Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey
December 21, 2020
Still from the film Atlantics, 2019.
Film

In the Atmosphere

In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history
Lindsay Turner
June 1, 2020
Abstract geometric image.
Books

Speech Acts

Eunice de Souza, a post-Independence Indian poet, explores the glitches in poetic voicing
Vidyan Ravinthiran
June 1, 2020
Dandelion seeds attached to stem.
Books

The Unthinkable

How do you put into words the boundless pain of losing a child?
David L. Ulin
June 1, 2020
Tove Jansson at her desk. ©Eva Konikoff/Moomin Characteers™
Books

Tove Jansson’s Genius

The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins
Evan James
June 1, 2020
Red texture in cloth
Books

Conspicuous Erudition

The new black poetry
Jerome Ellison Murphy
April 1, 2020