Eli S. Evans: Is That It

by Madhavi Menon Surprisingly, queer theorists have rarely encountered Shakespeare. Not because they are badly-read or have blinkers on, but because of a deep belief that Shakespeare existed “before” the days of queer theory, and so it would be anachronistic to put the one in conversation with the other....

CBGB, New York by James Warner Jennifer Egan’s fiction asks whether our experience is now technologically mediated to the point that we routinely mistake the map for the territory. In her book A Visit from the Goon Squad, she evokes a world where the pressure constantly to self-reinvent threatens...

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee Holloway, Secretary, Lionsgate Entertainment, 2002 From The Smart Set: There are mistresses, and there are homewreckers. We often believe that the only thing distinguishing one from the other is revelation. The mistress is the hidden, secret lover, but the homewrecker is the same woman splashed...

James Parks Caldwell by Mark Lause A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell, Edited by George H. Jones, Jefferson: Mcfarland, 277 pp. An Ohio-born writer, James Parks Caldwell left us a remarkable set of documents, including his diary of eighteen months...

Trading Stories | by Jhumpa Lahiri

The New Yorker

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is...

Boasting a scandalous history, Joyce’s novel is famous for the controversy it caused when it was serialized in the Little Review...

by Thomas Travisano The poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was once considered a comparatively isolated figure. Because she shunned labels and avoided becoming identified with well-publicized literary movements, she was once considered—as David Kalstone wrote in 1977— a “hard to ‘place.’” However, as her posthumous fame has grown and...

Graffiti art by Banksy, near Ikea Croydon From Boston Review: Every Sunday morning I spend a few hours with the colossal edition of the New York Times and its tendency to sum up because I don’t want to see the week coming; I’d rather watch it going. One Sunday...

Yellow Brick Philosophy | by Ellen Handler Spitz

The Book

Although details have not yet been released, The Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard...