Criticism & Features

The fact that language mediates reality is one of those human conditions which can feel banal to remark upon. Rachel Aviv argues for its peculiarity and interest in her sparkling

Note: In the collaborative spirit of this jointly-authored volume and the four philosophers it follows, three NBCC board members worked together to write this appreciation. “We were bored of listening

Some families have enough musicians to populate an orchestra, others breed athletes, and some, I suppose, create hordes of CPAs. In Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s family, there are generations of healers,

The speaker of Cynthia Cruz’s Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books) inhabits hotel rooms in Warsaw, Berlin, and Belgrade, anonymous rooms simultaneously serving as archives of memory and as blank interiors

“You haven’t earned your right to be tired yet, have you, Donkey?” This line, the conclusion to Margo Jefferson’s landmark Constructing a Nervous System (Pantheon), serves as a flash point

The Gaza of Mosab Abu Toha’s childhood is a land of tortured ambiguities, a precarious, uncertain place where “you don’t know what you’re guilty of,” where “breathing is a task”

In her extraordinary work, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton), Kelly Lytle Hernández offers a reexamination of the Mexican Revolution by studying the enmeshed history of

Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury) is an astounding intellectual and social history that unfolds in three acts. It begins with the Russian seeds

From the first page of Japanese writer Kawakami’s third novel published in translation from Bett and Boyd (after Breasts and Eggs and Heaven), the reader is swept under by a