Tragic Strip

By Tom Motley

MAY 2019 | Fiction

Tom Motley is a cartoonist, illustrator, and educator. His publications include Tragic Strip (a monthly strip in the Brooklyn Rail), The Golden Ass, The One Marvelous Thing, and contributions to the indie anthology Cartozia Tales. He teaches cartooning at the School of Visual Arts and illustration at Pratt.

Negar Djavadi's Disoriental

By Shohreh Laici

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Books

“Escalators are for them.” This is crucial to Darius Sadr—father to the protagonist of Disoriental, and a symbol of Iranian progressives who reflect the regret and disappointment of Iranian intellectuals living in exile. Later in the book, the author makes it clear that this sentence was her original source of inspiration in writing the book.

Inspiration and Obsession

By Josef Helfenstein

MAR 2018 | Critics Page

In general, drawing is regarded as a medium of artistic spontaneity and directness. It is the art form that most clearly reflects the immediacy of psychic expression. The drawings of Louise Bourgeois possess these qualities to an unusual extent, but there is far more to them than that.

On Being a Pest

By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

NOV 2019 | Critics Page

I’ve spent a lot of time online trying to find out whether Stephen Miller, architect of this administration’s most inhumane immigration policies, has a dog. He’s likely behind the dehumanizing language Trump has used to describe undocumented immigrants—as animals—but to use “animal” as an insult reveals a lot about our species’ relationship to other living things—we maim, shoot, skin, and rape animals for our pleasure. I don’t know, I just kind of wanted to know if Stephen Miller had a dog.