February 5, 2026 Unfinished On Kathleen Collins’s “Blue Obstacles” By Alix Beeston Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins. It is a stitched composition notebook in a classic style: speckled, with a black-and-white cover. Burnished by time, it’s also patterned by a network of surface fissures, corrugated marks, and mottled shapes yellowing to gold. At some point the notebook appears to have been bent back on itself—crushed, perhaps, in the bottom of a bag or a drawer. I can only make out some of the words written on the front in blue ballpoint: “NOVEL,” confident in capitals, and what I’m pretty sure is the year “1974.” The notebook belongs to Kathleen Collins, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose body of creative work was mostly unpublished and unproduced prior to her death from cancer, at forty-six years of age, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed 2015 theatrical release of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing Ground, Collins’s work has found the broad public audience it didn’t during her lifetime. Her posthumous acclaim has been secured largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, as a nineteen-year-old in 1988, gathered her mother’s papers from her house and stashed them in a large trunk. They stayed there for many years until she felt ready to sort through them. When she did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother composed sharply observed fictions of Black middle-class life. Those manuscripts now form the spine of Collins’s official archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; they’re also the basis of the two published volumes of Collins’s writing that Nina edited, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019). Read More
February 4, 2026 First Person The Coke Factory By Turner Brooks Drawing by Turner Brooks. I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis. The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins. Read More
February 1, 2026 Bookmarks Eggs Delicately Balanced By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Ann Rower’s Lee & Elaine (Semiotext(e)), first published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002: For months after she’d put her signature bubblegum vaginas on his mailbox. From Daniel Poppick’s The Copywriter (Scribner): “I’m done,” Ruth says over a quarter of a plate of roasted cauliflower, delivering the words like a lithe boxer elegantly working a punching bag. One of our cats, the bullseye tabby, jumps on the table and in a single motion I mindlessly pick him up and throw him on the couch, where he emits a soft meep upon impact. Lucy reaches for Ruth’s plate. “Oh, I meant I’m done with poetry,” says Ruth. “But you can take the plate. Thank you, it was delicious.” Read More
January 29, 2026 Arts & Culture On Broadway: Four Musicals and Me By Kevin Champoux All photographs courtesy of the author. One Easter Sunday, I attended a screening of the film Jesus Christ Superstar put on by my friend at the Brooklyn, New York, office of the well-respected literary magazine where she worked. There were about eight people there. All appeared to be treating the event as a substitute for church service: something they felt obliged to do. A French and comparative literature Ph.D. student made a point to tell me that he did not “get” musicals and was not expecting much from the film. He told me this, I think, because he knew I occasionally write theater reviews, attend Broadway musicals, and generally engage with the medium in a way that most people who pursue advanced degrees in French—and socialize at the offices of well-respected literary magazines on warm Sundays in April—do not. In the exchange that followed, I was able to ascertain that the real scourge for him was not movie musicals, which at least fit into a larger framework of film history, but the Broadway shows that are their frequent source material. It was a problem, he said, of overblown emotion. It was not relatable. I did not mount the exhaustive defense that he maybe thought I would. But I did ask him if he enjoyed going to the opera. “Of course,” he said. My own interest in the genre should not be overstated. Most Broadway musicals I have seen courtesy of comped tickets or evenings out with my parents. All those I’ve attended of my own volition have been written in some capacity by Stephen Sondheim, who is about as intellectually prudent a favorite as one can have while still being wearily unoriginal. Still, within my milieu, it doesn’t take much to be considered a “musicals person.” I wasn’t sure I was. But I found it odd that in a world where art and fashion and literature commingled with ease, musicals remained an object of scorn. Read More
January 27, 2026 On Film The Answer Is Love: On Reds By Laurie Stone Still from the movie Reds. Screenshot from official trailer. What are we ever really fighting for? The answer is love. Love in the movies, and on the streets, and in our heads—instead of the dead people we are seeing right now. Existence is a contagion of love. That’s why you have to fast-forward through a bunch of scenes in Reds, where men are giving speeches to other men in English and Russian with those faces of certainty—not hope, but certainty—that they are right and have it all figured out. You know those men. You’ve been to those meetings with the guy in the front—it could be a faculty meeting—the guy jabbing his finger, not like Mick Jagger in a dance routine, more like Moses holding a tablet. Those guys who love the sound of their voice more than they love love. Everyone has been to one of those meetings, or hundreds of them, wondering how they were still breathing with all the air sucked out of the room. A fair number of these scenes interrupt Reds, which runs for more than three hours and has an intermission, like Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey, both excellent movies, as is Reds, if you gently fast-forward past the speeches and get back to John Reed and Louise Bryant, a love story. Read More
January 26, 2026 Home Improvements Mold and Melancholia By Madeline Cash Charles West Cope, Hope Deferred, and Hopes and Fears That Kindle Hope, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. In London, trash is called rubbish and taking it out is a science. There is a bag for trash, a bag for compost, and a bag for recycling, a bag that is bestowed by one’s neighbo(u)rhood council and will not be picked up if not in the proper counsel bag every other week on Wednesday between 6 P.M. and 7 P.M., which are called 18:00 and 19:00. All rubbish goes in a bin with a secure child lock that isn’t for children but for foxes. I moved to the UK with my boyfriend, who’d enrolled in graduate school in London. My work is flexible and I thought I’d tag along. I thought, It won’t be so different. They speak English, after all. Apartments are called flats and applying for a flat isn’t dissimilar, I’d imagine, from applying to the CIA, which is called MI6. If one is approved for a flat, one must order Wi-Fi from a company called EE, which will not send someone to set up your Wi-Fi if it is a bank holiday, of which there are many, or if it is raining. It is always raining. For many flats, the heating is connected to the internet, so one cannot get heat unless one gets Wi-Fi and one cannot get Wi-Fi if it is raining or a bank holiday. Beneath several blankets, my boyfriend said, “It’s like we’re living in a different era,” an era before internet and heating, a time when time moved slower. It took a month before a nonraining nonholiday came along, and with it a man from EE. The man from EE wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit. Cookies are called biscuits because there is a tariff on cookies but not on biscuits, so this is a verbal loophole for the British cookie companies to avoid higher taxes. Read More