The Hudson Review

The Hudson Review Quarterly magazine of literature and the arts, founded in 1948. Poetry, fiction, essays, and more.

The Hudson Review was founded in 1947 by Princeton University alumni Frederick Morgan '43, Joseph Bennett '43, and William Arrowsmith '45. They were students in the first creative writing course taught at Princeton, by the poet Allen Tate. The students became editors of the college's Nassau Literary Magazine, and Tate advised them to begin their own literary magazine once they completed their serv

ice in World War II. The first issue of The Hudson Review was published in spring 1948, and the magazine has been in continuous quarterly publication ever since. In 1998, Frederick Morgan turned over the editorship to Paula Deitz, who joined the magazine in 1967 and became Coeditor in 1975. The journal's name denotes its origins in a makeshift office in lower Manhattan, across the street from the Hudson River, in the trustees' room of the Sapolio soap factory owned by Morgan's father.

Reading Memories of Distant Mountains is like sailing over the surface of another’s consciousness with occasional glimps...
10/16/2025

Reading Memories of Distant Mountains is like sailing over the surface of another’s consciousness with occasional glimpses of the depths....Perhaps the advice not to get too personal in his published notebooks has kept them from being one of his deeper wellsprings, yet here they are, colorful and oblique, by turns beguiling and baffling, an exhibit worth seeing, though you may not dwell there for long.

—David Mason reviews Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022, by Orhan Pamuk, trans. by Ekin Oklap from Alfred A. Knopf. https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/orhan-pamuk-curated/

If only the pit-digging machinehad spit out a darkopening to the underworld: a man sweating over levers,his machine a bo...
10/15/2025

If only the pit-digging machine
had spit out a dark
opening to the underworld:

a man sweating over levers,
his machine a boat and he,

its oarsman.
How I would have loved to peer
into the pit and seen, not its

bottom, but a river’s slurry
oozing downward, ferryman
bearing all three into Elysium.

—From “Isles of the Blest” by W. J. Herbert https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/sound-isles-of-the-blest-winters-end-in-the-arbor/

A cloud of blackbirds rains upfrom a field and storms offfor a place where summer is morereal by a single sunflower. Aba...
10/13/2025

A cloud of blackbirds rains up
from a field and storms off
for a place where summer is more
real by a single sunflower.

Abandoned, the field follows,
the way fields move, by growing wilder,
a wildness restrained by its own caress
that overripens blackberries

—From “July” by Stuart Dybek https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/july/

Like the other authors in this survey, [Zaborowska] feels a personal connection and addresses [Baldwin] directly: “A bis...
10/12/2025

Like the other authors in this survey, [Zaborowska] feels a personal connection and addresses [Baldwin] directly: “A bisexual immigrant woman from Cold War Poland, I was the same age when I came to the United States that you were when you first left it.” She can occasionally lapse into twenty-first-century jargon (“I call the approach I see in your work Black q***r humanism, although I realize that you weren’t exactly down with either ‘Black’ or ‘q***r’ as labels”). But essentially James Baldwin: The Life Album is an admirable work, balanced and intelligent.

—Brooke Allen reviews James Baldwin: The Life Album, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska from Yale University Press, & four other books on Baldwin. Read the rest, free to nonsubscribers, at https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/james-baldwins-apotheosis/

Still, Boop! is not a total success…Betty’s journey to enlightenment is ultimately something we’ve seen before, and its ...
10/11/2025

Still, Boop! is not a total success…Betty’s journey to enlightenment is ultimately something we’ve seen before, and its expression in this show, while amiable, is anodyne. Like Barbie, Boop! grafts an original plot onto an old icon, but the show lacks the film’s sharp edges and its trenchant interrogation of contemporary socio-politics. Rogers’ terrific performance makes Boop! worth seeing, but it does not feel like a show that will last beyond its current iteration.

—Erick Neher reviews Boop! The Musical. https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/celebrating-originality-in-broadways-musical-lineup/

Image: Jasmine Amy Rogers (Betty Boop) and Company in the BOOP! The Musical, a new musical directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, composed by David Foster, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and book by Bob Martin. Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Mullen’s work is characterized by a mix of social commentary and serious wordplay. Her love of the lexicon, of paradox, ...
10/10/2025

Mullen’s work is characterized by a mix of social commentary and serious wordplay. Her love of the lexicon, of paradox, of nonsense recalls Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear....Her poems are multivoiced and packed with allusions ranging from the literary canon to pop culture. It is out of this “jagged mosaic,” powered by a prodigious capacity for invention, that she constructs her own “masterpiece of mayhem.”

—Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen from Graywolf Press https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/what-draws-us-together/

Publishing a poem or a book of poemsand releasing it expectantly into the worldis like dropping a rose petalinto the Gra...
10/09/2025

Publishing a poem or a book of poems
and releasing it expectantly into the world
is like dropping a rose petal
into the Grand Canyon

and waiting for the echo, as Don Marquis,
author of Archy and Mehitabel
and sixteen forgotten other books
famously said. Or not so famously.

—From “Rose Petals” by Rachel Hadas. Read the rest, plus two more poems, free to nonsubscribers, at https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/the-gates-of-war-rose-petals-secondhand-prose/

In general, the show was best when it found fresh ways to celebrate the genius of the original but foundered when it fel...
10/08/2025

In general, the show was best when it found fresh ways to celebrate the genius of the original but foundered when it fell back on cliché and camp.…The production half worked, coasting on general high spirits. Much goodwill was lost, though, when the adapters shoehorned a well-principled but heavy-handed, derivative ode to diversity and inclusion in the show’s final minutes. Gilbert, who valued a light touch, would not have approved.

—Erick Neher reviews Pirates! The Penzance Musical revival https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/celebrating-originality-in-broadways-musical-lineup/

Image: (Left to right): Nicholas Barasch (Frederic), Ramin Karimloo (Pirate King), David Hyde Pierce (Gilbert/Major General Stanley) and the company of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway production of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. Credit: Joan Marcus, 2025.

I recall Tolstoy had trouble concluding his novel,And yes, past page 1128, there follow Epilogues,And afterwards, an App...
10/07/2025

I recall Tolstoy had trouble concluding his novel,
And yes, past page 1128, there follow Epilogues,
And afterwards, an Appendix, “A Few Words
Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” where I land,

Suddenly skimming, and find “Why did millions
of men set about killing each other, as it has been
known ever since the world began that it is both
physically and morally bad?” A rhetorical question,

For “men were fulfilling an elementary zoological law
which the bees fulfill by exterminating each other in
the fall. . . . No other answer can be given.” Shall this
Become the prism through which I’ll now read,

Seeing a fractured hive’s self-consuming bees?

—From part 7 of the poem “War and Peace” by Brian Culhane https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/war-and-peace/

Edna Ferber was a huge and perennial success for an astonishing forty-some years. Astonishing, at least for a writer now...
10/06/2025

Edna Ferber was a huge and perennial success for an astonishing forty-some years. Astonishing, at least for a writer now so nearly completely unread…Through the Roaring Twenties and right on through the Depression and beyond, she was a self-educated single woman making immense amounts of money by her wits alone in the most glamorous industries in America. She was a staple for decades of the women’s pages, as they were called, and you would think a biographer’s dream, but—it’s complicated.

…

The thing about reading Ferber now is that it is like watching very good television, which explains pretty completely where her audience went….Giant Love has a different story to tell, not of a huge artistic gift, but of a considerable talent, a powerful sense of mission, plus a ferocious work ethic….And it tells us much about women’s roles in Ferber’s lifetime, including those with thin skin and tempestuous natures, who despite fond stereotypes are not rare in life or in fiction.

—Beth Gutcheon reviews Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie Gilbert from Pantheon Books. https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/the-lives-of-edna-ferber/

When needed most, his glasses—have they failed? I try them on.The scratches on the cabinets are gone, the rooms are brig...
10/02/2025

When needed most, his glasses—
have they failed?

I try them on.
The scratches on the cabinets are gone,

the rooms are bright,
the windows clean,

and my reflection in the glass
is beautiful.

—From “His Glasses” by Joyce Schmid https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/his-glasses/

This inclusion [of both Greek and Latin poets] renders his book extraordinarily ambitious. Most translators would stick ...
10/01/2025

This inclusion [of both Greek and Latin poets] renders his book extraordinarily ambitious. Most translators would stick to just one of the ancient languages, since while classicists are trained in both, they usually specialize in one or the other. This is a welcome decision, as it gives us an anthology that covers most of the ancient world. If anything, Childers is too inclusive…Yet genre is nothing if not flexible, and the inclusion of a number of poets not normally thought of as lyric does no real harm, though it does make a big book bigger…Professor Most’s point that most of the poetry in Childers’ selection tends “very strongly not only to be spoken by an explicit first person ‘I’ or ‘we’ but also to take as [its] subject matter the experiences and views of that speaker” feels like the essential defense of the book’s expansive borders.

—Bruce Whiteman reviews The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, trans. and ed. by Christopher Childers, afterword by Glenn Most from Penguin Classics https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/the-sorrowful-fates-of-lyric-poets/

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