Reviews Archives - Page 6 of 17

Reviews

My Life in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

July 27, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

My mother seemed to me, when I was a child, a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. She was, like the Queen of Hearts, idiosyncratic and imperious, someone with whom you could never win an argument, even when you knew you were right and she was ...

Reviews

James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

An exhibition at the Morgan Library

July 8, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. This year, the Morgan Library in New York is celebrating with a remarkable exhibition, “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” on display until October 2. ...

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

Reviews

Titane: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

The winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or takes us through hell and out the other side

November 3, 2021 • by Melinda Freudenberger

The following review contains spoilers. My friend has a phrase she likes to use about her new dog. “I look at him from across the room,” she says, after talking to me about all the piss pads littering her apartment floor, “and I can tell he’s having bad dog thoughts.” Something ...

Titane: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

Film & Performing Arts

Faculty TeeVee

In the Netflix series The Chair, Sandra Oh is charged with a Sisyphean task: an English department faculty in decline. Spoiler alerts!

August 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ It’s such a setup, and one of Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim’s colleagues knows it. As Dr. Kim settles into her office as the first woman—the first woman of color, no less—to chair the English department at the fictional Pembroke University, a package awaits her. It is a nameplate for her desk which ...

Feminism

More Misandry, Please!

France Needs More Man-Haters—but Pauline Harmange doesn’t seem to be one of them

April 28, 2021 • by Hannah Leffingwell

_____ The cover of French feminist Pauline Harmange’s recent book I Hate Men (Fourth Estate, 2021, translated by Natasha Lehrer) prepares the reader for a salacious world of feminist intrigue, and a no-holds barred misandrist rant for the ages. Arranged in bold block letters over a neon yellow background, the title ...

Gender

Cis Lit and the Trans Writer

On Torrey Peters and the possibilities for trans girl fiction

January 12, 2021 • by McKenzie Wark

What would happen if we took seriously the perspectives of trans people, and allowed them to potentially transform how we see the whole of gender? Detransition, Baby is a book about what cis and trans women might have to say to each other. It does allow a certain amount of cis tourism ...

Literature

Elena Ferrante Returns to Naples

A new novel delights, but reveals decay

October 8, 2020 • by Daniel DiMassa

————— The four novels in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga were a literary sensation when they appeared between 2011 and 2015. Now she’s back with a new novel in seven parts, The Lying Life of Adults, with a translation by Ann Goldstein. Though no less compelling than her blockbuster series, the smaller ...

Education

Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

A review of Jennifer Hirsch’s and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

September 10, 2020 • by Emily Rutherford

------------- A decade ago, I was a resident adviser in a residential college at a highly selective university. My colleagues and I used to roll our eyes at the highly legalistic "affirmative consent" model of sexual education that we were asked to teach first-year students. Focused on the idea that sexual ...

Reviews

The Tangled Web of Familial Homophobia

A Secret Love (Directed by Chris Bolan, Netflix, 2020)

June 25, 2020 • by Jen Manion

But I was not prepared for the central role in the documentary film played by Terry’s nieces, Diana Bolan and Tammy Donahue; nor was I prepared for their jarring, casual homophobia. A Secret Love begins with Terry and Pat coming out to their families after having been a couple (they told ...

Race

When the Penis Is Property

Why we can’t talk about the sexuality of enslaved African American men

June 11, 2020 • by Kevin Mumford

In Joseph Lavallée's novel, The Negro Equalled By Few Europeans, an enslaved African man named Itanoko describes being raped by a white slaver named Urban. The white man was "struck with my comeliness,” Itanoko says, which "made him violate, what is most sacred among men.’” According to Thomas Foster’s Rethinking ...

Reviews

Void Bitches

To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world.

May 21, 2020 • by McKenzie Wark

If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because our bodies are a disaster already. Now that the whole planet has some kind of dysphoria, maybe it’s our time to shine. It’s a ludicrous idea, I know, but one reads in these times with a ...