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,

The rain stopped. The sun almost came out, but stopped. The war halted; truce/truce! People stopped hating each other. Then someone stopped believing in the truce and it stopped being one. —From “Braking News” by J. Allyn Rosser

Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Civilians by Jehanne Dubrow @lsupress.bsky.social: 1/2 A candid look at what happens to a marriage in the aftermath of active military service…Now the battles are not an ocean or a continent away, the strikes are not by faceless drone or the impersonal machinery of war.

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