It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.
Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...
Wolitzer’s nine novels for adults all explore, in some combination, modern womanhood, family, relationships, and creativity—subjects with which she is intimately familiar as a woman, wife, mother, novelist, and daughter of a novelist.
Andrew Hudgins’s The Joker, part memoir, part joke book, is so fresh and original that it seems without precursor. Like a good joke, it doubles our vision, inserts anarchy into logic, pleases us with its felicities of phrasing, and stuns us...
When Claire and I and her youngest child, baby Nedi, arrive at Lettieri Café in Yorkville, the singletons of our little therapy group—Yves and Elena—are already there. Only Claire and I are married; she has a big family and I don’t have...
It’s been almost forty years since I bought an image of Sri Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, from a street vendor in the Chor Bazaar—the Thieves’ Market—in Mumbai, which at that time was still Bombay. I’ve had the picture...
