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Bianca

- By C.M. Crockford

A review of Bianca by Eugenia Leigh (Four Way Books, 2023)

“Trauma” and “grief,” or rather such shallow incarnations of serious psychological phenomena that they merit air quotes, have become trendy concepts in recent 21st century discourse and media. Movies and television use the traumatic past as a major plot revelation (The Matrix Resurrections, Succession, Yellowjackets), or the antagonist becomes a walking, talking metaphor for PTSD and unresolved issues (the recent Halloween, Smile). Then, through the wonders of narrative, the troubled protagonist finds an unusually easy solution to their problems, often...

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Reviews

Under Our Skin

- By Alexander Aguayo

A Review of Under Our Skin, by Joaquim Arena, translated by Jethro Soutar (Unnamed Press, 2023)

I like to say that Joaquim Arena’s memoir/travel narrative Under Our Skin, translated by Jethro Soutar and published by Unnamed Press, arrived to me at the perfect time, because I had been learning about extraordinary historical figures from the African diaspora, such as the grammarian Juan Latino, Madame Priscilla, Postmaster Charles Graves, and Sister Mary Wilhemina, when I read about the illustrious João de Sá Panasco in the pages of this book. Depicted in a Lisbon street scene by an anonymous sixteenth-century Flemish painter in the portrait Chafariz d...

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Reviews

The Heart of the Ironbound

- By Briana Bhola

A Review of I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López (The Feminist Press, 2024)

Annell López’ short story collection, I’ll Give You a Reason, brings us to the heart of the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. These stories explore race, colorism, Blackness, identity, sex, and gentrification, among other topics. López gives us gritty and complex characters with their vulnerability on full display; her stories are often devastating, yet empowering. Through López’s expressive and captivating writing, these characters and their hardships feel tangible. Her pages are a portal: readers fall into them and walk the streets of Newark. We feel...

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Reviews

Natalia Ginzburg’s Essay “The Jews” and Its Trials

- By Domenico Scarpa

Editor's note: The full version of this essay will be published in a new collection of essays: Natalia Ginzburg's Global Legacies, edited by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). [1]

For a long time Natalia Ginzburg avoided talking openly about her Jewish origins. She interrupted her silence, or rather, her reticence, for the first time in “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei,” 1972), an essay published on the third page of the daily La Stampa, on September 14, 1972. Her collaboration with Turin’s newspaper had begun in December 1968.[2] Whether she...

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Reviews

When, Where, And How to Belong in a Portrait: Big Questions in Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance

- By Shanta Lee

Review of Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance by Kevin A. Brown. Forthcoming in 2024 from Parlor Press.

Will our life’s work be considered a lead melody or an accompanying harmony in the symphony of history? Does it matter if one plays first or fourth chair in the orchestra if we are talking about a piece that forever changed modern music? Or perhaps it does not matter how large or small of a role one played as long as one was in the room, because that symphony was situated within a period that created a lasting legacy for music. This metaphor applies to some of the persistent questions posed by Kevin A. Brown in Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance. By the author’s own admission, this collection is not “. . . an...

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Current Issue

Volume 65, Issue 2

Front Cover by Daisy Quezada Ureña
Untitled (detail) 2018
Porcelain and clothesline in Wuhan Student Dormitory
500 Sq. Ft.

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