From “At Pillings Lake” by David Livewell: 1/2 To one kid, Mr. Frost was Robert Frost. At Pillings Lake, he’d greet us at the gate: Wrinkled, white-haired, and wise. The old man tossed The day-pass on our dash, then winked. I’d wait

From "Reflections on Projection” by Andrew Stark: 1/3 Two things can bear as little resemblance as chalk and cheese. But if we have forged an association between them—my math teacher threw a piece of chalk at me in 9th grade, for example, when I tried to eat a piece of cheese

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 2025 poetry contest! All winners have been notified individually, and will be formally announced and published in our Spring 2026 issue. Our next poetry contest will open on April 1, 2027.

The wilderness survival story has been given a twist by the nimble Mr. Walter, who may have invented a new genre, the how-to-survive-whackjob-cults-in-the-wilderness novel. It’s a lot of fun. —Susan Balée reviews So Far Gone by Jess Walter, from Harper. hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...

From “Dilapidated Sonnet” by Matt Quinn: 1/2 The hole in the roof of the garage across the road just spoke to me, said how much it wanted me, that I should clamber up, lean in, let go. It offered me a musty kind of sleep in with all the things it stores,

Erick Neher on Tennessee Williams' “Camino Real,” at Williamstown Theatre Festival: 1/4 A large supporting cast inhabits a wide variety of eccentrics searching for meaning amid the general madness. This search mirrors the audience’s experience: Camino Real is the very definition of a hot mess.

...off-red rose hips that clung to the bush all winter. The flowers fell long since, but those small globes offer intimations of hope. So I try to imagine, because the dismal bog needs a counter-vision… —From “A Bog in Late March” by Sydney Lea. Read the rest at hudsonreview.com/2025/10/i-li...

The great French poet and master of the form Francis Ponge [comes to mind]....Trousdale has mastered a number of discourses and found the comedy and pathos in each of them. —Mark Jarman reviews Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale from Wesleyan University Press

Marina Harss reviews Alexei Ratmansky's Solitude, New York City Ballet: 1/3 Solitude is almost shocking in its unflinching depiction of the fragmentation of consciousness produced by loss…we see an embodiment of mourning: a man teetering on the edge of the void, aching to join the dead.

Susan Balée reviews Katabasis by R. F. Kuang from Harper Voyager: 1/2 Katabasis felt to me like just a parody of academic life by someone deeply ambivalent about graduate school...the prose flowed and academia can indeed be a fascinating hellscape, but it’s not a book I’ll revisit.

Ozon expertly contrasts the soft beauty of the characters’ surroundings with the harsh reality of their inner lives, creating an aura of menace no matter how banal the on-screen activities might be....An old-fashioned, well-made drama. —Brooke Allen reviews When Fall Is Coming, dir. François Ozon

From “At the Spaniard Inn” by David Livewell, about poet Desmond O’Grady: 1/2 He’s in the churchyard now, the plot he picked, Rincurran Cottage and his writing window still staring back—but from the other side.

From “Trimalchio in West Egg at 100: Gatsby and Modern Character” by Robert Archambeau: 1/3 There is some irony in how Trimalchio became the model for Jay Gatsby, in that a curious reversal happens to the very idea of literary character in Fitzgerald’s greatest and most resonant creation.

Erick Neher on Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s performance of “The Matchmaker” by Thornton Wilder: 1/4 The play’s afterlife proved richer still as it became the foundation for Jerry Herman’s 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, a cultural juggernaut that eclipsed Wilder’s original.

Bruce Whiteman reviews Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of the Odyssey @uchicagopress.bsky.social : 1/6 In Book XXIII, Odysseus convinces Penelope that he is indeed her long-lost husband by describing their marriage bed in close detail. She breaks down in tears....

“Subjunctive Mood” by Maria Terrone: 1/2 If only I could have lived a different life, I would have dwelled within another skin, where I would be not me now, but me then (the impossible not time and place), happy in my condition contrary to fact. Were that possible, I would not be held captive

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

Park marries irreverence to originality, and I found myself laughing out loud….More word-loving, mind-altering stories follow the first. —Susan Balée reviews An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park from Random House. hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...

Marina Harss reviews Justin Peck’s Mystic Familiar, New York City Ballet: 1/3 Is Peck entering a Minimalist phase? At the moment, his ballets have a claustrophobically self-referential feel, as if he were intent on returning again and again to the same questions:

David Mason reviews Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch @yalepress.bsky.social : 1/3 Damrosch is the kind of scholar who knows a character when he sees one....Stevenson proves a perfect subject for him—eccentric, vital, adventurous, and, with good reason, beloved.

In flight, I felt him on the other side Of his just-published letters, many penned In Glanmore’s “vale,” his “bastion,” “silence bunker,” “A scribe’s stone cell” tucked close to Glendalough, Where slates still drip like ink on alder leaves. —From “The Other Side” by David Livewell, on Seamus Heaney

The photos are so beautiful and expansive that they read momentarily as abstractions; it takes a moment to realize that we are looking at an almost certainly irreversible affront to the natural world. —Karen Wilkin reviews Edward Burtynsky at the International Center of Photography

If they are elegy, they make a garish show of it, cascadingly penultimate: a tablecloth’s lace tracery, a coronet of frozen waves, or speckled plumage which a few glittery stamens straightened through. Nothing stays long. Nothing behaves. —From “Day Lilies” by Dylan Carpenter

Mark Jarman reviews Young Woman with a Cane by Reginald Gibbons @lsupress.bsky.social 1/2 His political stake is with younger generations and those yet to be born: “If only we could ask children now for future forgiveness. But it’s not fair to do so. Or even think so.”

Cody did not know Wade played the harp. It was not the sort of thing one soldier shared with another... —From “The Only Real Thing,” a short story by Elizabeth Hamilton hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...

Brooke Allen reviews Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, dir. Embeth Davidtz: 1/6 Bobo’s world will probably look as strange to a modern-day American audience as it does to her. How to make sense of this weird society and its contradictions?

Poorer than a mouse, here I am, writing and writing—but to whom? To myself at that crossroads. The key is offered once, fortune does not insist. Decipher it fast, the code that’s proffered to the flame. —From “I Would Have Left Behind” by Maria Luisa Spaziani, tr. Andrew Frisardi

That Leonora should find her love for James unrequited and his loss a deep blow seems particularly ironic because a twenty-five-year-old Leonora would never have been interested in him in the first place. —Susan Balée reviews The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social

Erick Neher reviews Twelfth Night and the reopening of the Delacorte Theater: 1/4 To see Shakespeare in the Park is not simply to watch a play; it is to participate in an urban rite of endurance and reward and to belong, however briefly, to a commons that cuts across class and borough lines.

When the red-tailed hawk swoops low, its eye a whirlpool of greed, should I bet all of me on the limping squirrel? —From “Poem Ending with Four Lines by Seneca” by Maria Terrone hudsonreview.com/2025/10/poem...

Alexandra Mullen reviews Dickens the Enchanter by Peter Conrad @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social: 1/3 Dickens the Enchanter has no pretensions to scholarship….And I can’t find fault with [Conrad’s] argument, because this book doesn’t have one beyond the claim that Dickens is terrific.

There was an old-world grandeur in the way the steps were presented for the audience’s enjoyment, and yet, the ballet felt fresh, generous, big-hearted.…At moments like this, ballet seems as alive as ever. —Marina Harss reviews Alexei Ratmansky’s Paquita, New York City Ballet

From “I Listen to April” by Sydney Lea: Oh Lord, what a musical world! For now at least, I feel greatly blessed to exist within it. Some lingering pine siskins hiss as one from conifers close by. I’m all alone, no reason to speak, and I’m too keen for sounds anyhow.

Winterbottom...has been able to make an emotionally subtle and understated film…Shoshana takes its audience dramatically into a place and time that continue to mold world historical events. —Brooke Allen reviews Shoshana, dir. by Michael Winterbottom

From Judson Mitcham's satirical poem "Corrections": 1/3 Come on, who could be sorrier than we are? In our profile, “Unarmed Youth Planned to Be Doctor,” a bizarre auto-correct kicked in, so the word dead

One great thing about writing a fiction chronicle and getting all the books of a season is that you’re bound to discover a great writer you’ve never read before. Last summer, for me, that writer was Emily Itami. —Susan Balée on Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami @marinerbooks.bsky.social

The old cliché of never being at a loss for words is evident on every page of these letters, and they match perfectly with the behavior of Updike the novelist. —William H. Pritchard reviews the Selected Letters of John Updike, ed. James Schiff @aaknopf.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2025/10/john...

Karen Wilkin on “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity” at the Jewish Museum: 1/3 Shahn was a brilliant illustrator, able to distill the essential elements of narratives into simplified, sensitively composed images. Witness Liberation (1945), a meditation on Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War,

1. So Busy I wonder what my left brain has been up to During all these years of virtual silence, While my me-brain was so busy daydreaming. —From “Eleven Lebens” by Marilyn Nelson

In revising, draft after draft, I think of a sculptor freeing that character from the dense wooden block of existing from day to day and hour to hour, what Virginia Woolf called “getting on from tea to dinner.” —Lyndall Gordon, a prizewinning biographer, reflects on her craft

Our autumn issue is now online! Featuring essays by Lyndall Gordon & Robert Archambeau; poems by Marilyn Nelson & Judson Mitcham; reviews by David Mason of a Robert Louis Stevenson biography & Michael Thurston of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Prose; and more! Browse the issue at hudsonreview.com

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf is a generous, optimistic book….One feels in [Ríos'] vernacular diction and narrative pacing the patience of a storyteller, the morality of a fabulist. —Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Every Sound Is Not a Wolf, by Alberto Ríos @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

It’s a psychic landscape, both personal and public, an adjunct to his other books and an experiment on its own. But not quite on its own. I doubt anyone not already interested in Pamuk could make much of its text. —David Mason on Memories of Distant Mountains, by Orhan Pamuk, tr. Ekin Oklap, Knopf

From “Isles of the Blest” by W. J. Herbert: 1/2 If only the pit-digging machine had spit out a dark opening to the underworld: a man sweating over levers, his machine a boat and he,

Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen @graywolfpress.bsky.social: 1/2 Mullen’s work is characterized by a mix of social commentary and serious wordplay. Her love of the lexicon, of paradox, of nonsense recalls Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear....

From “Rose Petals” by Rachel Hadas : 1/2 Publishing a poem or a book of poems and releasing it expectantly into the world is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon

Erick Neher reviews Pirates! The Penzance Musical revival: 1/3 In general, the show was best when it found fresh ways to celebrate the genius of the original but foundered when it fell back on cliché and camp.…The production half worked, coasting on general high spirits.

From part 7 of the poem “War and Peace” by Brian Culhane: 1/3 I recall Tolstoy had trouble concluding his novel, And yes, past page 1128, there follow Epilogues, And afterwards, an Appendix, “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” where I land,

When needed most, his glasses— have they failed? I try them on. The scratches on the cabinets are gone, the rooms are bright, the windows clean, and my reflection in the glass is beautiful. —From “His Glasses” by Joyce Schmid

Bruce Whiteman reviews The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, tr. & ed. Christopher Childers @penguinclassicsusa.bsky.social: 1/4 This inclusion [of both Greek and Latin poets] renders his book extraordinarily ambitious. Most translators would stick to just one of the ancient languages,