Criticism

Review: W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen

  • Richard Howard

Democratic Detective

The novels of Paco Taibo Ignacio II reveal the raw sewage of Mexican politics — and a labyrinth of solidarity hidden beneath it.

  • Scott Sherman

Review: Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters

  • Bonnie Costello

Imagining the Nation

On poetry from Vietnam.

  • Nguyen Ba Chung

Writing About Revolution

Revolutions are acts of hope. That’s why they are the terrain of novelists as much as historians.

  • Edwin Frank

Identity and Immunity

In the face of the AIDS crisis, physical expressions of love are as revolutionary as the act of writing poetry.

  • Rafael Campo

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Inventing Irving Howe

He yearns to be a socialist leader, a man of action, but what he loves is the Talmudic solitude of the written word.

  • Michael Greenberg

Lesbian Fictions: Straight or Narrow?

Traditionally, lesbians have appeared in fiction just long enough to be saved by men, perform acts of gross depravity, or suffer at their own hands.

  • Kerry Fried

Realization and Recognition

The art and life of John Fante.

  • Neil Gordon

Review: Carl Philips’s In the Blood

  • Stephen Tapscott

Review: Elaine Brown’s Taste of Power

  • Farah Jasmine Griffin

The Mapplethorpe Moment

For the photographer, art happens when the heat of living and the ice of death meet.

  • Michael Bettencourt

Making It New

For a second generation of Holocaust writers, the wounds are still open but the language is closed.

  • Jonathan Wilson

The Month of Rushdies

  • Eliot Weinberger

Walking the Line

Don DeLillo and the New Journalism.

  • Cecelia Tichi

Inside Book Reviewing

The moral quandaries of criticism.

  • Gail Pool

Video Novels

 TV subverts even the possibility of morality, of human responsibility.

  • Cecelia Tichi

Is There a Postmodern Music?

Serialists are consolidating one of the most radical shifts in music history.

  • Arthur Berger

Under the Gun

The thing that’s missing from American writing today.

  • Alfred Kazin

Le Cage au Dull

The varieties of gay fictional experience.

  • Daniel Harris

The Emperor’s New Fiction

Writers of the lost voice.

  • Rosellen Brown

The Long March of the New York Intellectuals

And the fate of criticism.

  • Neil Jumonville

After Rawls

The scramble of moral philosophy.

  • David Steiner

Heaney Agonistes

In Station Island, Seamus Heaney continues his personal struggle with the meaning of the Irish past and the relation of poetry to poitics.

  • Shaun O’Connell
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