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The Queer Thing about Sin

“I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march… we need answers.”

What We’re Reading the Third Week of January 2026

A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.

New Translations of Jacinta Kerketta

“If we listened to what Adivasi culture teaches us about love, we would learn not only how to love each other but how to love all living beings in nature.”

Living Precariously

“One side effect of dexamethasone, this powerful steroid, was that I could no longer type… I was, as I told her, ‘awry.’ A good Miltonic word.”

How The Onion Reinvented Satire

Christine Wenc’s history of The Onion reveals how a deliberately fake newspaper anticipated today’s media landscape, influencing journalistic form, audience skepticism, and the boundaries of political humor.

My Unfathomable Year with Karl Ove Knausgård    

“When we talk about the unfathomable, we must try to fathom. We must not turn away but give witness.”

Requiem for the Post-Gazette

“The Blocks set fire to the 125-year-old legacy established two generations earlier by journalists who bore the same family name, but took their mission to be bulwarks against civic ignorance and misinformation more seriously than their descendants.”

Jacinta Kerketta on Loving Like a Tree

An interview with Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerketta on language, love, resistance, and writing against the violences of caste, extraction, and the nation.

Did the Wolf Finally Leave?

“Today, future prospects for greater Pittsburgh are decoupled from the prospects of the steel industry, a reality that remains difficult to accept for a region identified for so long with the once monolithic industry.”

It’s not (just) about the Tteokbokki

“Baek Se-hee’s ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki’ and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.”

Monthly Columns

the foundry

The Foundry

Third Person Limited

Studiolo

Object Lessons Impressions

Read The Latest

  • Essays

What We’re Reading the Third Week of January 2026

A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.

  • Reviews

How The Onion Reinvented Satire

Christine Wenc’s history of The Onion reveals how a deliberately fake newspaper anticipated today’s media landscape, influencing journalistic form, audience skepticism, and the boundaries of political humor.

  • Essays

New Translations of Jacinta Kerketta

“If we listened to what Adivasi culture teaches us about love, we would learn not only how to love each other but how to love all living beings in nature.”

  • Interviews

Jacinta Kerketta on Loving Like a Tree

An interview with Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerketta on language, love, resistance, and writing against the violences of caste, extraction, and the nation.

  • Excerpts

The Queer Thing about Sin

“I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march… we need answers.”

  • Reviews

It’s not (just) about the Tteokbokki

“Baek Se-hee’s ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki’ and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.”

  • Essays

Living Precariously

“One side effect of dexamethasone, this powerful steroid, was that I could no longer type… I was, as I told her, ‘awry.’ A good Miltonic word.”

  • Essays, Object Lessons Impressions

Otohime

Object Lessons Impressions plays with an Otohime.

  • Excerpts

Did the Wolf Finally Leave?

“Today, future prospects for greater Pittsburgh are decoupled from the prospects of the steel industry, a reality that remains difficult to accept for a region identified for so long with the once monolithic industry.”

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Essays

See More →

What We’re Reading the Third Week of January 2026

A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.

New Translations of Jacinta Kerketta

“If we listened to what Adivasi culture teaches us about love, we would learn not only how to love each other but how to love all living beings in nature.”

Living Precariously

“One side effect of dexamethasone, this powerful steroid, was that I could no longer type… I was, as I told her, ‘awry.’ A good Miltonic word.”

Interviews

See More →

Jacinta Kerketta on Loving Like a Tree

An interview with Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerketta on language, love, resistance, and writing against the violences of caste, extraction, and the nation.

White Coal – Dimitris Lyacos in Conversation with Toti O’Brien

“As I am writing this, my plane is getting closer to Moscow. I am probably already flying over tens of former gulag camps and penal colonies, now hidden under the earth I intermittently see under the clouds.”

Karla Boos’ Curtain Call at Quantum

Quantum Theatre’s Visionary Founder Karla Boos is retiring. She sits down with editor Ed Simon to talk about what’s next.

Reviews

See More →

How The Onion Reinvented Satire

Christine Wenc’s history of The Onion reveals how a deliberately fake newspaper anticipated today’s media landscape, influencing journalistic form, audience skepticism, and the boundaries of political humor.

It’s not (just) about the Tteokbokki

“Baek Se-hee’s ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki’ and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.”

Climate Dystopia with a Beating Heart

Megha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief” is a moral thriller disguised as a family story.

Excerpts

See More →

The Queer Thing about Sin

“I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march… we need answers.”

Did the Wolf Finally Leave?

“Today, future prospects for greater Pittsburgh are decoupled from the prospects of the steel industry, a reality that remains difficult to accept for a region identified for so long with the once monolithic industry.”

Framing the Humanities

“The sense that work in the humanities is subjective or ungrounded in relation to the sciences occludes the more fundamental distinctions between the two forms of research.”

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