Louise Marburg reviews Origin Stories by Corinna Vallianatos @graywolfpress.bsky.social: 1/3 There is no question that Vallianatos is a superbly talented writer…but there’s a difference between being an excellent writer and being a good storyteller, and I didn’t initially think she was the latter.

The new show is so much better than its television source material that it almost feels like a big success, which it isn’t....For the most part the show passes by pleasantly enough. But it’s never electrifying, never truly hilarious. —Erick Neher reviews Smash on Broadway

From “After My Father’s Memorial Service” by Henry Hart: 1/2 To sleep, I listened to mice scratch paths toward poison in the attic, the metal FOR SALE sign flap above the driveway’s snowbank. Or was it my father? Each night he scuffed in Army boots

Brooke Allen on Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me, by Douglas Field @manchesterup.bsky.social: 1/3 Field identifies with Baldwin, different as their lives have been in almost every way. The sympathy and admiration is profound; the connections in their circumstances more tenuous.

An infinity of elegies—loss and in naming loss, such recovery that we rise from our midnight stupor only to be throttled by her familiar, the blazing sun, or, in lighter hours, one that seeps past doorjambs, window cracks, strokes velvet eyelids awake. —From “Reading Ruth Stone” by Susan Gubernat

Karen Wilkin reviews “William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio” at Hauser & Wirth @hauserwirth.bsky.social: 1/5 We can simply savor the drawings…for their rich surfaces and engaging, enigmatic imagery, but in tandem with the film, they become even more mysterious.

Charles McGrath reviews Switch: The Complete Catullus, tr. by Isobel Williams @carcanet.bsky.social: 1/3 By far the oddest, most eccentric, and most original of the recent Catullus renderings is Isobel Williams’ Switch: The Complete Catullus, which in many respects is hardly a translation at all...

The baby’s brain vibrates, alive with bright energy. I envy the way her eyes take in maple, railing, slide, snowy remnants at the edges of asphalt, cluster of school children milling... —From "Sound & Light Open the Sky" by W. J. Herbert hudsonreview.com/2025/08/soun...

This alternately goofy and heartfelt musical is based on a true story, but that story is so outlandish, and the show’s approach so surprising, that the result feels like nothing you’ve seen before. —Erick Neher reviews Operation Mincemeat

St. Aubyn’s brilliance as a comic writer comes into full play.…The verbal feats are presented by a narrative imagination that, in its human richness, is hard to live up to. —William H. Pritchard on The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn @everymanslibrary.bsky.social

[Mercy] had me at page one. A daisy chain of characters connected either intimately or remotely or not at all...it’s about six characters, finely drawn, who live vital and captivating lives. —Louise Marburg reviews Mercy by Joan Silber from Counterpoint Press. hudsonreview.com/2025/08/ode-...

Becky Y. Lu on Pierre Boulez: 1/4 Iconoclast, titan, maverick. Even when it is not his centennial year, such superlatives to describe Pierre Boulez abound. These brash identities, however, are arguably informed by his writings rather than his music.

1/3 Our fiction contest is open! Submit a story of up to 10,000 words online at hudsonreview.com/submissions by 11:59 p.m. on November 30, 2025. 1st prize: $1,000 + publication; 2nd & 3rd: $500 + publication. As always there is NO FEE to submit.

From “Whale” by Grace Schulman: 1/2 …My sneakers dug in sand trackless, with cracked ice, as I remembered years back, how you and I ran down to sea, laughing. I thought not much of death, —

Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen @redhenpress.bsky.social: 1/2 The desire for a name that connects to ancestry is a central preoccupation…[The final three] poems are written in a form of Paschen’s devising: three columns of Osage, phonetic translation and English.

There had to have been a point when everything transformed: some line in the sand crossed, some liminality. Isn’t a gate a door? A threshold. There you are. There had to have been a moment, the after and before: no war gave way to war. —From “The Gates of War” by Rachel Hadas.

What might initially seem like a sentimental oddity evolves into a meditation on memory, mortality and the desire—perhaps the right—to love and be loved. The show suggests that even machines may be haunted by the echo of a happy ending. —Erick Neher reviews Maybe Happy Ending

Lerner clearly has a rich imagination. I’ve found myself recommending Ring to my more curious friends simply because I’ve never read anything like it. —Louise Marburg reviews Ring by Michelle Lerner from Bancroft Press hudsonreview.com/2025/08/ode-...

Karen Wilkin reviews The Frick Collection back at its original home, and its Vermeer exhibition: 1/4 Now it is just as exciting to see things back where they have always been, against refreshed and remade backgrounds, in vastly improved lighting.

Another Summer Solstice, by Ted Kooser: 1/3 I have lived long enough to have listened to rain put out a bonfire, a slow rain, hiss after hiss, a fire that my neighbor made, then jumped over laughing. Have stood back and looked on

"One wishes the two men had had an opportunity to meet...Als’s writing...captures Baldwin in a way I’ve never quite heard before." —Brooke Allen reviews God Made My Face, ed. by Hilton Als, from Dancing Foxes Press/Brooklyn Museum hudsonreview.com/2025/08/jame...

From “Voyager 1” by Kieron Winn 1/2 It seems a homemade toy: a bowl, some labels, Matchsticks, Meccano strips, and folded card. (They did use kitchen foil to shield some cables From Jovian radiation.) One small disc

Who knew better than she the futility of grasping at things that weren’t yours to begin with? As if anybody could! But roses and white jasmine, a strip of green lawn, the hard work of coaxing okra and papaya out of a little backyard—surely these were her own? “Zinnias in the Graveyard,” Annie Zaidi

Meg Schoerke on Sylvia Plath's Collected Prose: 1/2 Among fiction writers, there’s a commonplace that professionals impart to beginners:...you should expect to write at least a million words before “finding your voice” and gaining the technical mastery to produce consistently excellent work.

From “‘An Extraordinary Transformation’: Mikhail Baryshnikov’s 15 Months at New York City Ballet” by Marina Harss: 1/3 Reviews of his adventure at City Ballet were mixed. There were the predictable polemics about whether joining the company had been a big mistake, an eccentricity, on his part.

Our summer issue is now online! Featuring 3rd-prize winner of our short story contest Annie Zaidi; poetry by Grace Schulman, Ted Kooser & Rachel Hadas; reviews on James Baldwin biographies & Sylvia Plath's prose; our new dance reviewer Marina Harss's essay on Baryshnikov, & more! hudsonreview.com

Excerpt from "Préface en Prose" by Benjamin Fondane, trans. John Balaban & Donka Farkas, Winter 2018: 1/3 I am talking to you, my opposite Others. I am talking man to man with that bit of myself which remains a man that bit of my voice still stuck in my throat.

Here lie the dreams we put to rest. And there, the things we meant to say. Further on, those bits of faith. Mindless things, they bore no pain, and easily went to their graves. It’s we who are not quite the same. —From the archives, "Dear Friends" by Wendy Videlock, Autumn 2013

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our poetry contest! Submissions are closed. But there's our short story contest to look forward to, opening for submissions on September 1! No fee, 1st prize: $1000, 2nd & 3rd: $500. For more info & stories by past winners: hudsonreview.com/news-events/...

There's only a few days left to submit to our poetry contest! 1st prize: $1000 + publication, 2nd & 3rd: $500 + publication. Submit up to 5 poems online at hudsonreview.com/submissions. Ends July 31, 2025, at 11:59 pm EDT. No submission fee. More info: tinyurl.com/53wketha

An excerpt from “The Alibi” by Ștefan Augustin Doinaș, trans. John Balaban, Winter 2019: 1/2 What flag shall we fly over the city? Where shall we flee? All roads are cut. Like God Who Is Everywhere, we had a hand in all these deaths. Accomplices—yet whose? Stuff my mouth with rags so I can’t speak.

From the archives, an excerpt of "A Game of Chess" by Cally Conan-Davies, Autumn 2018: 1/2 Here, I am given the space to see the boy let go his queen too soon, the look on his face. The man takes the queen away and the empty square is an immensity the boy cannot move

A rational book in an irrational world can be a welcome oasis. —From the archives, "A Cast of Individuals" by David Mason, Summer 2019

At noon no shadows show themselves. Now I must live in death’s vacancy, full of sheer clear pictures that haunt. Stunned, I stand where the old tree stood— what else can I do?—everything shot through with light. —from “The Light Around Your Death” by Elizabeth Spires

Asako Serizawa on Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, tr. by Haydn Trowell @europaeditions.bsky.social: 1/3 A rumination on the nature of fate, chance, coincidence, and crossroads, in Goodnight Tokyo, we’re no longer in the realm of monadic individuals...but in an anonymously interlinked world...

More straightforward and more traditional...Our Evenings begins like a familiar type of English bildungsroman (think Great Expectations or Jane Eyre)…All this is a familiar, even comforting, pattern in the English novel. —Tom Wilhelmus reviews Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst from Random House

Overlaps, patches of tone, erasures that left ghost images echoing more assertive lines, and occasional deviations from vertical and horizontal became eloquent players in subtle dramas.…Everything demanded and rewarded close attention. —Karen Wilkin reviews Myron Stout at Peter Freeman Gallery

Our poetry contest is open! 1st prize: $1000 + publication, 2nd & 3rd: $500 + publication. Submit up to 5 poems; manuscripts accepted electronically at hudsonreview.com/submissions or by mail to 33 W 67th St, NY, NY 10023. Ends July 31, 2025. More info: tinyurl.com/53wketha

Bruce Whiteman reviews Water, Water by Billy Collins from Random House: 1/3 That is evidence of artfulness enough, I suppose; but together with Collins’ devotion to stanzas of equal length in many of the poems, here to my ear is where his poetic qualities begin and end.

Powers continues his career-long investigations into scientific knowledge from his familiar “aerial” perspective, one in which all human speculation is conceived...as an inherited form of “play.” —Tom Wilhelmus on Playground by Richard Powers @wwnorton.com

“When We Gather at the River” by David Hamilton: 1/3 Am I in the right line? The lobby’s dense with travelers, the signage at the far end indistinct. A man to my right seems ready to help but slips away before I phrase a question. As for luggage, were my bags

From “Music About Music” by Becky Y. Lu: The [piano part] seems undemanding; the piano burbles via a single line of sixteenth notes beneath the breathless…violin melody. In performance, however, the part is notoriously difficult, for what Brahms wants from the piano is not at all pianistic.

Asako Serizawa reviews The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata: 1/5 It is tempting to read The Rainbow as yet another novel by a traditional male writer obsessed with the fantasy of female promiscuity and its control…

High points of the nineteenth century include a portrait of an architect friend made by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres...a vivid likeness created with fragile lines and patches of tone breathed onto the surface. —Karen Wilkin on “Paper, Color, Line” at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Brooke Allen on Night Train to Munich (1940): I was moved by the trap in which so many Central European actors of the [WWII] period found themselves: having escaped their homelands for political reasons, in England and America they were promptly boxed into roles as Nazis, thanks to their accents.

The poet herself is ever present, caught...in that photographic moment between the present and the past, between the work-a-day world of errands and the eternal world of Bach’s music. —Bruce Whiteman on St. Matthew Passion by Gjertrud Schnackenberg @arrowsmithpress.bsky.social tinyurl.com/32y74m6n

From “This Poem May Contain”: thoughts that breathe and words that burn, the palace of mistakes you’ve earned, a hundred thousand ticking clocks, ten times more of natural shocks —by Cally Conan-Davies tinyurl.com/mrbfk3cm

Massive irony [is] at the heart of Agualusa’s tale, where the disaster yields to...talk about book tours, festivals, workshops, residencies, panels, publishers, agents, how to become more visible on the Internet. —Tom Wilhelmus on The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa

[Murphy] focuses on things most of us would ignore or at least not regard aesthetically…We are made privy to Murphy’s acute, restless awareness of her surroundings, her appetite for the unexpected, magically turned into paint or graphite. —Karen Wilkin on Catherine Murphy at Peter Freeman Gallery

It’s a lesson...in how a disappointed idealist becomes a misanthrope...how a mind can be so incisive in some areas, so blind in others, and how an artist finds authentic voice, loses it, and has to rediscover it through the productions of a lifetime. —David Mason on Mark Twain by Ron Chernow