Reviews Archives - Page 2 of 17

Genocide

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

A review of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

November 14, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume ...

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

Literature

Naguib Mahfouz’s Last Dreams of Cairo

In a new translation of the author’s late writing, dreaming is an act of mapping Egyptian identity

November 11, 2025 • by Mariam Matar

The Arabic word barzakh refers to the liminal space between death and the day of judgment. In his introduction to a new collection of Naguib Mahfouz’s late-career writing on dreams, editor and translator Hisham Matar describes Mahfouz ensconced in a barzakh-like state during the final decade of his life. In ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Literature

Blurb Me

Promotion uber alles in Ada Calhoun’s Crush

June 3, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A ...

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

Prisons and Police

Cooking Noodles on Rikers Island

In their new book, City Time, former inmates David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan take a sociological look at life inside

May 6, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr

Not only is Rikers Island geographically isolated—a landmass situated on the East River between the Bronx and Queens—but what happens there is kept out of the public’s sight. Journalists are given limited entry into day-to-day life on the island, which houses the city's largest jail. Now, in City Time: On ...

Climate & Ecology

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

April 22, 2025 • by Lily Chishan Wong

Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply ...

Film & Performing Arts

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...