Karen Wilkin reviews Hauser & Wirth’s Philip Guston exhibition, “Life with P.”: 1/3 The works mostly post-dated the family’s move to Woodstock in 1967 and seem to reflect on domesticity, sometimes to disturbing effect. The large paintings were intense and spectacular…

Lorna Knowles Blake reviews The Dance by Christian Wiman @fsgbooks.bsky.social: 1/2 Wiman is a preternaturally gifted poet. Fluently moving from persona poem to parable to haiku and everything in between, there is seemingly nothing out of his prosodic range.

From "At the Grave of Tiem Duc Bui" by Charles Martin: In truth, though, being born turns out to be An inestimable gift that should amaze Us all by its improbability. hudsonreview.com/2026/07/at-t...

Louise Marburg reviews This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman from Dial Press: By the end I felt that seventeen [stories] was not enough…this is a wonderfully written and most entertaining book filled with characters I felt I already knew and know far better now. hudsonreview.com/2026/07/a-de...

Marina Harss reviews the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Firebird: 1/3 Taras and Holder’s Firebird is untouchable, unsentimental, sharp in every way, without an ounce of the eroticism of Fokine’s original concept.

“Blackbirds” by Jeffrey Harrison: 1/3 The European blackbird is a much better singer than the blackbirds at home, and now I’ve found that my own poems sound better in Italian. This morning I heard two of them read aloud, and they sounded

Brooke Allen reviews The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt @wwnorton.com 1/5 One of [Doctor Faustus'] most innovative features, hugely influential on all future drama (and film), was Marlowe’s invention of the soliloquy.

Erick Neher reviews Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, revived by Roundabout Theatre Company: 1/2 Coward’s central theme is neither adultery nor marital regret, but rather the complex web of love, jealousy, devotion and rivalry inherent in any intensely close friendship.

From “The Nearer Realm” by Rebecca Kilroy, second-prize winner of our 2025 short story contest: 1/2 He straightened up when he saw me and exclaimed, “Christ, but he’s risen!” I frowned. “The storm wasn’t so bad out my way. No danger of me being blown out to sea, surely.”

From “The Salt Waking” by David Mason: We know the cold burns. That’s why we come to it with caution, immerse and remember to breathe. The salt abrasion is a kind of home. hudsonreview.com/2026/07/citi...

From “The Unmeasurable” by Pegah Ouji @pegahouji.bsky.social, winner of our 2025 fiction contest: 1/ Iran, our home, is watered by the sacrificed blood of our martyrs, Sheena reads in Isfahan News on her iPhone’s cracked screen. The Peykan Uber spits her out in front of the historic Motamedi house.

Our summer issue is now online! Featuring Pegah Ouji & Rebecca Kilroy, the 1st & 2nd prize winners of our 2025 fiction contest; Antonio Muñoz Molina's diary entries from writing his 2019 novel; poems by Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi & Jeffrey Harrison; & more! hudsonreview.com/issue/summer...

Karen Wilkin reviews “William Perehudoff: Boundless Color” at Berry Campbell: 1/4 The works on view explored the resonance of the raw materials of painting, as manipulated by a distinct personality.

From “These Days” by Robert Cording: 1/2 I like to walk with my kind, following the shoreline, one foot in front of the other, as if it were truly a plan to stay alive. What I like most is how we’ve lost all thought of our out-of-shape, misshapen bodies, weighed down by years

Mark Jarman reviews A Violence by Paula Bohince @princetonupress.bsky.social 1/2 [Bohince] admits, “I’ve held on to // childishness longer than most…” There is a difference between childhood and childishness, and A Violence reminds us of that repeatedly, as much like a lullaby as a prison sentence.

Marina Harss reviews August Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano @nycballet.bsky.social: 1/5 What struck me most was the way the characters depicted by the two dancers treated each other: the tenderness, the delight in each other’s presence, the warmth.

From “Bliss,” a short story by Louise Marburg: 1/2 The man keeps shooting and shooting until I think I’ll lose my mind. Then suddenly there’s silence, which is just as disturbing in its way. Don’t move, the toothpaste lady mouths. I nod and close my eyes.

Brooke Allen reviews Becoming Led Zeppelin: 1/4 Some critics have complained that the film skips over the band’s bad behavior…but I appreciated that decision. The movie is about music and only music; and it is music, of course, that makes this band, these men, interesting.

Tom Wilhelmus reviews House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones @riverheadbooks.bsky.social: 1/2 Instead of plot, it proceeds (like Flights) by labeled sections with titles like “Dreams,” “Mushroominess,” the names of characters, “Rhubarb”…

Michael Thurston on Larry by Michael Haag: 1/5 Many books are luxuries, and it is probably unproductive to wonder whether any book is really necessary. Nevertheless, I finished this biography nagged by the question of why it had been published, especially when it is so obviously unfinished.

Karen Wilkin reviews Elisa D’Arrigo at George Adams Gallery: 1/2 [The exhibition] provided fresh evidence of the authority of her uncanny little objects…Despite their small size—or perhaps because of it—D’Arrigo’s sculptures clamor for our attention. They reward it richly.

Part I of "History" by Eugenio Montale, trans. by Nicholas Adams & David Schenck: 1/3 History does not unwind like a chain of unbroken rings. Anyhow, many of the links do not hold. History has no before and after,

Tom Wilhelmus on Departure(s) by Julian Barnes @aaknopf.bsky.social: 1/3 Early in Departure(s) it is important for the author-narrator to announce that the book would eventually contain a story, although that would have to come later. What it begins with instead is a lengthy disquisition on memory.

Mark Jarman reviews The Furies by Moira Egan @lsupress.bsky.social: 1/3 Moira Egan’s The Furies⁠ evokes incarnations of vengeance and conscience to remind us in particular of classical forms of judgment…Egan’s emphasis is the feminist response to masculine sin.

Erick Neher reviews Robert Icke’s adaptation of Oedipus: 1/2 There is perhaps a message of hope amid the mayhem of the play’s finale. Oedipus ultimately demonstrates how thoroughly knowledge can dismantle authority. Sophocles had faith in the power of truth, no matter how brutal it might be.

From "Big-Leaf Maple" by Michael Spence: 1/2 I’d hoped to stare At those leaves waving their great green⁠— Hello/farewell—as I lay in our bed at the end. My husband learned the secret: how to leave His body on the couch. His surest move. I think he might have smiled at the irony

Brooke Allen reviews The Choral, directed by Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner: 1/6 The Choral, Ramsden’s choral society, has played a major role in the community for a long time; now, two years into the “Great” War, it is decidedly frayed.

Charles McGrath reviews True Nature by Lance Richardson @pantheonbooks.bsky.social: 1/5 [Peter Matthiessen] always insisted that only the fiction mattered. His journalism, he said—his travel and nature writing—was just what he did to pay the bills. “It drains my batteries,” he complained.

Perri Klass and Larry Woolf review Fra Angelico at Palazzo Strozzi: 1/4 Fra Angelico’s world touched the Medieval tradition of the monastery monk and also pointed toward the world of high Renaissance Florentine art. But the world Fra Angelico painted remains his own, radiantly beautiful,

“Summer Wind” by David Lehman: You can’t count on Cézanne’s bather at MOMA, or Monet’s poplars, or even “Summer Wind” sung by Sinatra to restore order when all nature’s in an uproar: