Tag: story

The Journey of a Madwoman: Between Facts, Memory, and a Fractured Self

I started with a walk. The walk would lead me into the past. It took me to a hospital. A hospital that was no longer a hospital. That was the idea. I would describe the hospital, my home. If I could walk, I could remember. It wasn’t nostalgia. My memory is disordered. The building had […]

A Summary and Analysis of John Cheever’s ‘The Worm in the Apple’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright strange. In Cheever’s short story ‘The Worm in the Apple’, the narrator […]

“Women! In! Peril!”

The following is the title story from Jessie Ren Marshall’s collection Women! In! Peril! . Marshall is a Japanese-American writer who holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her work has appeared in The New York Times ‘ Modern Love column, Electric Literature, Triquarterly, The New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Barrelhouse, The Common, ZYZZYVA, […]

A Tale of Four Troubled and Talented Sisters, Told With Irish Flair

The illustration shows a hilly Irish countryside under a nighttime sky, with three sisters searching for their lost fourth sibling in the foreground. THE ALTERNATIVES, by Caoilinn Hughes Caoilinn Hughes’s exuberant third novel opens with Olwen Flattery, a geology professor, lecturing her undergraduate students about tectonic convergence. “ Just imagine the force it would take […]

A Modern California Dream, Still Haunted by Hippie Darkness

Credit…Robert Beatty THORN TREE, by Max Ludington For every idyllic image of the 1960s there exists its dark inverse, a symbol of menacing chaos. Give me your flower crowns at Woodstock, your free love in Haight-Ashbury, and I’ll hand you the murdering Manson family, or the 5-year-old in Joan Didion’s “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” high on […]

Watching Pixels Die: Sony, HBO, and “The Last of Us”

WITH THE ARRIVAL of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Amazon Studios adaptation of Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout on April 10, the long-heralded convergence of prestige video games and prestige television finally seems fully underway. A version of this synthesis had long seemed inevitable. Despite decades of usually half-hearted attempts and the prevailing sense that Hollywood has […]

“We’re Never Alone”

Tobias Wolff at the Spring Revel in 2024. The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award , our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his […]

Review: In ‘The Outsiders,’ a New Song for the Young Misfits

Brody Grant, center, as Ponyboy Curtis after the rumble in the musical “The Outsiders” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in Manhattan. For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with […]

Against Journaling: Dennis Tang on the Joys of Not Writing It All Down

I remember being a small child, doing arithmetic at the kitchen table, but not what state I was in—Delaware, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, we moved all around. I remember the face of my middle school bully, but not his name. I remember falling desperately in love with a girl in my college Shakespeare lecture, but not what […]

To Polly Atkin, “Diagnosis is Like a Wedding”

Photo by Andreas Strandman via Unsplash Often in illness narratives, the diagnosis marks a moment of triumph. There’s an a-ha moment and the main character rejoices, finally having a name for their symptoms. A medication or course of treatment available that might bring the patient to their former body. There is a sense of restoration, […]