Tag: Criticism

Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo honor the writer's life, work, and legacy.

Because it hinges on who will accept blame for causing climate change, there’s never been so much at stake in the naming of a geological era.

Recent works depict the agonies and rage of being a low-wage housekeeper or nanny. But all fail to identify capitalism itself as the culprit.

Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

A series of creative reflections on why Yusef Komunyakaa remains one of our greatest living writers and what it means to be a Black Jazz Poet.

The director’s life reflected both the feats and the failures of the postwar U.S. experience.

Amidst a boys’ club of ’70s-era comics, Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie was unique for its feminist depiction of the political and sexual awakening of young women.

Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.

John Wieners was one of the most important gay poets of his generation.

Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.

In the 1974 cult-classic teleplay Penda’s Fen, the past holds the key to escaping the catastrophic present.

On Dennis Cooper’s transgressive fiction about marginalized men.

The French Algerian writer steadfastly defended democracy and humanity against dogmatic ideologies of all stripes.

Among the most innovative poets of European modernism, he forged a new path for poetry after the terrors of the twentieth century.

Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy continues a long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American whiteness.

In Vineland, his underappreciated 1990 novel, Thomas Pynchon anticipated a United States in which security would become the greatest good. 

Rereleased this year in a single volume, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Three Californias imagines three possible futures for the world writ large through the lens of Orange County, California.

Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?

Virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital.