Unfortunately, I Like It Too
Sharon Marcus
Dec 2 2019
Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, published in 2017, has been one of the great literary success stories of the Brexit and Trump eras, especially among readers who, ...
Selected Fields
Apr 1, 2019
A Symposium on the American Landmass
Twenty years before Jamestown was established, a small group of colonists settled Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. When one of the colonists, John ...
Feb 1, 2019
A Symposium on Generations
My first diary had a lock on it. I’d write to my future self, expecting that I’d go back one day and read everything. I never did—until I did, years later, after unearthing ...
Nov 30, 2018
A Symposium on Garbage Art
All ancient cities stand on layers of rubble, waste, and human remains. Rome is no exception. In Sister Stop Breathing, a collection of short fictions centered mostly on the ...
Oct 1, 2018
A Symposium on the Modern Family
“Why are we like this?” the daughter screams several minutes into Will Eno’s play The Open House. The question sits between a pair of tense silences, the sort that are ...
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Latest Fields
Guest Critic: Oscar Villalon
Oscar Villalon
Dec 2 2019
How do you know what you think you know? This question—with that emphasis—is, I think, at the heart of criticism. Taking as a given the journalistic or scholarly aspects of ...
Microreviews: December 2019/January 2020
Yashwina Canter
Dec 2 2019
At the moment, I’m interested in art that takes gentleness seriously as a subject without diminishing the bewildering amount of anxiety and hurt that comes with existing in ...
Narrative Trig
Rachel Z. Arndt
Dec 2 2019
The word machine stands out each time it appears in Masande Ntshanga’s latest novel, Triangulum, suggesting the predestination that’s so inherent in novels—they’ve already ...
Sex and Death
Bryn Lovitt
Dec 2 2019
If Rome were an actress, she’d be washed-up—at least according to forty-something Pricilla Messing, the protagonist of Liska Jacobs’s second novel, The Worst Kind of Want. ...
Beauty Truly Blent
Zoë Hu
Dec 2 2019
In her 2010 book Nox, the poet and classicist Anne Carson advises, “If you are writing an elegy begin with the blush.” Her suggestion confuses me: Blushing seems like an ...
The Field: The Trouble with Dreams
Lovia Gyarkye
Oct 1 2019
At the United States Embassy in Jamaica, a woman waits for her visa interview. It is hot. She is nervous. When she is finally called upon, she tells a compelling story that ...
Guest Critic: Gabriela Garcia
Gabriela Garcia
Oct 1 2019
The term transgressive fiction emerged in a 1993 Los Angeles Times article in which critic Michael Silverblatt described texts that cross moral and sexual boundaries with ...
The Field: An Immigrant Surveils the State
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Oct 1 2019
I spot the T-shirt one sunny day at a thrift store in San Francisco, pluck it from the rack, and hold it up to examine it. It’s a green, discolored military shirt. It is so ...
