Benjamin Hulett // Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and his own experience as a psychotherapist, Andrew Jamieson’s slim Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon (2022) testifies to the positive personal transformations that midlife crises can occasion. However, Jamieson’s edifying claims falter when the book precipitately casts the West as the ethical vanguard of humanity’s history and evolution. Jamieson…

Benjamin Hulett // Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021) is a significant contribution to “an ongoing so-called antisocial turn in affect studies,” a meticulous literary and speculative study of race and queerness, and a practical guide for “marginalized scholars struggling to survive in the academy” (10, 28) Through its…