Review: ‘My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer’ by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
The state of poetry in English is no better than it's ever been, and in many ways it's a great deal worse, but you can always bet on this much:...
Home > Reviews
All Stories
Comics’ superpowers
When I was 4 when I was bitten. My parents had taken me to Yellowstone National Park. I remember wooden walkways among geysers. Old Faithful was still faithful then. My...
Michael Robbins on reviewing
No one dreams of being a book reviewer when he grows up. You might dream of writing poems or novels or essays or even, if you are perennially picked last...
Review: “Forty-one False Starts” by Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm is not an art critic or a literary critic. She's a journalist, and I don't say that with condescension. She's a journalist the way Joan Didion is —...
Review: “NOS4A2” by Joe Hill
Joe Hill must get tired of being compared to his father. He writes under a pen name. But when you're a horror novelist and your father is Stephen King, the...
Review: ‘It’s No Good’ by Kirill Medvedev
When Keith Gessen, the co-editor of n+1, asked if he could send me his translation of a Russian author I'd never heard of, I had no idea what I was...
Review: ‘New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012’ by Charles Simic
How to write a Charles Simic poem: Go to a café. Wait for something weird to happen. Record mouse activity. Repeat as necessary. (For "mouse," feel free to substitute "cat,"...
Review: ‘New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012’ by Charles Simic
How to write a Charles Simic poem: Go to a café. Wait for something weird to happen. Record mouse activity. Repeat as necessary. (For "mouse," feel free to substitute "cat,"...
A grammarian’s lament
I recently read David Quammen's "Spillover," a scary, brilliant book about zoonotic diseases. Quammen is a marvelous stylist. But I was dismayed to discover, on page 506, this sentence: "One...
Review: ‘My Life and My Life in the Nineties’ by Lyn Hejinian
There's that John Cage quote people trot out when you call a piece of art boring — "In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it...