An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

  • The cover of Solidarity with Children, by Madeline Lane-McKinley, a purple downward-facing triangle over tan background with text.
    Horizons of Youth Liberation

    Sarah Brouillette reviews Madeline Lane-McKinley’s newest book, Solidarity With Children, from Haymarket. Lane-McKinley’s text conceptualizes the full scale of injustice perpetrated against children worldwide. By invoking Marxist-feminist theory, interpreting cultural texts, and critiquing sociopolitical conditions, Lane-McKinley surveys the horizons of a world in which children are no longer regarded as…

  • A History of Violence

    Noah Kulwin reviews Seth Harp’s new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” tracing the historical continuities between Vietnam War-era drug smuggling operations and the overwhelming present-day criminality taking place at the Fort.

  • The cover of "Born in Flames" by Bench Ansfield, showing text on a burned out building and street.
    Incendiary Schemes

    Charlotte Rosen reviews Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames—a stunning and revelatory analysis of the systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes that were perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx during the 1970s.

  • The cover of Sakina's Kiss, by Vivek Shanbhag, showing a line drawing of a woman's face and a Molotov cocktail.
    Romance of the Class Traitor

    Urvi Kumbhat reviews the new novel from author Vivek Shanbhag (trans. Srinath Perur). Originally written in southwest India’s Kannada language, Sakina’s Kiss has been republished in the U.S. by McNally. Trading keenly on romance tropes and genre signifiers, Shanbhag uses the figure of the class traitor to turn up bourgeois…

  • Cover of Robertson's Mediating Spaces, showing two military officers pointing at a board with the title.
    Yugoslavia at Scale

    For more than a century, socialists in South East Europe strove to enact their politics at a scale between the national and the global. Jonah Walters reviews James M. Robertson’s Mediating Spaces, a new book that describes the rise and fall of the supranationalism in the Balkans by examining the…

  • The Parent Test

    Anna Aguiar Kosicki reviews Hannah Zeavin’s new book “Mother Media”, calling it “an intellectual reappraisal of the history of technological mothering [which] casts much quietly accepted knowledge in new light.”

  • The red and yellow cover, with white text, of All This Safety is Killing Us.
    Carceral Health and Obscured Cruelty

    Physician Jake Sonnenberg reviews All This Safety is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders, which collects writings that cast light on the flagrant injustices of for-profit healthcare and its complicity with police and the state—from cops in hospitals and sting operations on pregnant women to forced sterilization.

  • The cover of Fredric Jameson's Invention of a Present, showing a painted image of a workshop, a guillotine, bookshelves, models, and several figures.
    Relief Maps of Time

    James Davis reviews Fredric Jameson’s last collection, Inventions of a Present, from Verso. What can the novel, as “time’s relief map,” still teach us about the contemporary fragmentation of meaning?

  • Two book covers, Make Your Own Job by Erik Baker and 99% Perspiration by Adam Chandler.
    Compliant Mechanisms

    Bradley Babendir compares two recent books that differ in their approach to critiquing the American pathology of entrepreneurialism and self-improvement: Erik Baker’s “Make Your Own Job” and Adam Chandler’s “99% Perspiration.”

  • Cover stating "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning / Peter Beinart"
    There is Only Shame

    The new book from Peter Beinart, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” is reviewed by Joshua Gutterman Tranen. “The truth that Beinart cannot face is that there is no prize to be won here, no silver lining to the thousands of Palestinians blown to pieces by Israeli-American bombs. There…