June’s Mixtape
Jonathan Leal on Domingo Martinez's continuing memoir.
All Reviews
Sins of the Sister
"Dark Rooms" is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a chilling mystery.
True Tales of Language, Lore, and Love from Chinese Flyover Country
The Anxiety of Misquotation
"Who exactly is misquoting Muhammad? Just about everyone."
Pre-Code Hollywood Confidential
“Hollywood knew how to manipulate a crime,” writes Mann, “their scenarists had been doing it for years.”
Fear and Lurking in Toronto
What was it like to be a young woman coming of age in that climate of fear?
On the Notebooks of Count Giacomo Leopardi
Leopardi's "Zibaldone assembles an argument for the necessary unhappiness of the human condition, at least in advanced cultures."
Shooting Magical Bullets at PTSD
A lucky, damaged man lost in a world of magical thinking.
Fear of the Cold: Aki Ollikainen
"Aki Ollikainen: his prose is as determined as the characters’ own will to live."
No Wave Feminism
Like Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, Kim Gordon’s memoir is the product of wonder at — and the struggle to reconcile with — how the life-changing loss of one’s partner could be so profoundly ordinary.
A Bronx State of Mind
Mark Wisniewski is not often a subtle writer, but death is not subtle.
T. Geronimo Johnson’s Racial Satire
Braggsville is not just a satire of the way we talk about race; it also addresses who gets to have those conversations.
Utopian Visions on a Wraparound Screen
"Is this because China hasn’t caught up yet to our cynicism? Do we know something they don’t? Or is it the other way around?"
Accidental Notes on the Syllabus
Randon Billings Noble's illustrated review of Lynda Barry's "Syllabus."
On the Other Side
Elizabeth Little on Lisa Leovy and Los Angeles, south of the I-10.
Real Cops
"Individual cop narratives tend to be more palatable than stories about the police system."