Reviews Archives - Page 4 of 18

Literature

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Under the author’s microscope, the affectations of the literati come into focus

February 20, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books, 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the ...

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Literature

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Isn’t So Funny

And maybe that’s the point

February 12, 2025 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa

I was prepared to laugh my way through Danzy Senna’s sixth novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, 2024), after reading review after review touting the book as a comedy. In this period of intense political and social divisiveness and strife, I hoped a fun satire (I like ridicule!) about a biracial (I’m ...

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Isn’t So Funny

Literature

When Is It Time to Leave?

In her new novel, Overstaying, Ariane Koch plays with the comforts of home

January 30, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the ...

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

Activism

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

December 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you. Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...

Film & Performing Arts

A Monk Without a Monastery

The paradigm shift of a single shot in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days

December 2, 2024 • by Daniel Kopp and Nicholas Johnston

In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck ...

Film & Performing Arts

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

A review of Attack on Titan: The Musical

November 26, 2024 • by Abha Deshmukh

Sitting in a mezzanine seat at the New York City Center, I was startled by a Colossal Titan coming to eat me. But I relaxed when Survey Corps soldiers came spinning and flying on their mobility gear to slice the Titan’s neck which is, after all, the proper way to ...

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

Art & Design

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

A celebrated young critic hungry for more than our contemporary culture typically offers

October 17, 2024 • by Emma Minor

Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The ...

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

Film & Performing Arts

La Chimera‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Do the souls of the dead miss what we have taken and sold?

October 16, 2024 • by Taylor Stout

One setting in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2024 film, La Chimera, collapses two thousand years of Italian history: an Etruscan gravesite in the shadow of a power plant. Here, where polluted ocean water laps at ancient dirt, the film’s merry band of tomb raiders (tombaroli) discover an untouched tomb brimming with artifacts—most ...

La Chimera‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Reviews

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

A review of Cue the Sun!—The Invention of Reality TV

October 15, 2024 • by Hannah Berman

Emily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer ...

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

Film & Performing Arts

Enter the Glow

Hannah Burns explores identity, escapism, and queer belonging in I Saw the TV Glow

October 9, 2024 • by Hannah Burns

Sometimes the only place we can be ourselves is inside the media we consume. Sometimes that is where we see options, where we feel less “other.” Watching I Saw the TV Glow, I loved the thought that Jane Schoenbrun’s amazing new film will join a queer film canon in which a ...

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...