[Selected Writings]

Reviews for The Nation 

Reviews for The New Republic

Reviews for The Atlantic

Review of a new collection of Belarusian poetry (The New York Times)

Essay on the ghost stories of former slaves (The New York Times)

Essay on how student loans are changing contemporary fiction (The New York Times)

Essay on Vladimir Sorokin on the occasion of two new translations of his work (Harper's)

Review essay on new Ukrainian literature (The New York Times) 

--More discussion on The New York Times Book Review podcast 

Profile of Ken Wissoker, editor at Duke University Press (The New Yorker)

Review of To Live is To Resist: the Life of Antonio Gramsci (Bookforum)

Review of Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (The Atlantic)

"Interview: Raven Leilani Needs to Know How Her Characters Pay Rent" (Lux)

"The Stenographer Who Married Dostoevsky and Saved His Life" (The New York Times)

"Something New Under the Sun, a Neo-Noir Set in an Even Thirstier Hollywood" (Vulture)

Review of Yan Lianke's Hard Like Water (The New York Times)

"Overlooked No More: Si-lan Chen, Whose Dances Encompassed Worlds (The New York Times)

"Memory Tricks" - a profile of the poet Maria Stepanova (Poetry Magazine)

"The Empathy Industrial Complex" (Bookforum)

"The Love Letters That Spoke of Everything but Love" (The New York Times)

"A Poet Reflects on Europe's Last Dictatorship" (The New Yorker)

"In Old Hollywood, Postal Workers Were Heartthrobs...Until They Got Labor Protections" (Slate)

​"False Grit" (Art in America)

"The Danielle Steel of Communism" (Lapham's Quarterly) 

"Leo Tolstoy vs. The Police" (The New York Times)

"On the Real Life Cross-Dressing Balls That Inspired HBO's Catherine the Great" (Vogue)

"In Russia, the Ultimate Scary Story is About Losing Your Coat" (The Paris Review)

"Artist Yevgeniy Fiks Photographs the Gay Cruising Sites of Soviet Moscow" (Frieze Magazine)

"What Inspired Lolita" (The Nation)

"From the Battlefield to Little Women" (New York Review of Books)

​"The Joys (and Pains) of Not Traveling Alone" (Outside Magazine)

"What does it Mean to Be Moved?" (Longreads)​ 

"Svetlana Alexievich's Child's-Eye View" (The New Republic)
 
"The Ideal Place to Disappear: An Interview with Julia Phillips" (The Paris Review)

 "How to Think Freely" (The New Republic)
 
"Ukraine Elected a Sitcom Star President. His Show Tells Us What to Expect" (Slate) 

"The Beauty of Invisibility" (The Paris Review)

"Burning Ambition: Susan Orlean's Tale of Arson and Unfulfilled Hopes in Los Angeles" (The Nation)

"The Trouble With Netflix's New Cold War Drama" (The New Republic)

"The Romanoffs' Missed Opportunity" (The New Republic)

"Making it in Capitalist Moscow" (The New Republic)

"How Dostoevsky Predicted Today's 'True Crime' Craze" (The New York Times)

"The Soviet Anthology of 'Negro' Poetry" (The Paris Review)

​"Floating in the Air: The Ideas that Made Crime & Punishment" (The Nation)

"The Cornel West/Ta-Nehisi Coates Feud Explained Through Russian Writers" (The Paris Review)

"When Oscar Wilde Colluded With the Russians" (The Paris Review)

"When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow" (The New York Times)

"A Forgotten Novel Reveals a Forgotten Harlem" (The Atlantic) 

"The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College" (The New Yorker)