A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously ...

Urmila Seshagiri
Urmila Seshagiri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches modernism, contemporary fiction, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (2010), and is writing a study of modernism’s legacies in contemporary fiction.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes ...
Falling Faintly: McEwan’s Latest
In 1893, the Scottish writer William Sharp began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. MacLeod’s poems caught the eye of W. B. Yeats, who admired her lyricism even as he disdained the ...