The Hudson Review

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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.

07/08/2025

More straightforward and more traditional, with an important though not unexpected twist, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel Our Evenings begins like a familiar type of English bildungsroman (think Great Expectations or Jane Eyre)…All this is a familiar, even comforting, pattern in the English novel.

—Tom Wilhelmus reviews Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst from Random House https://tinyurl.com/2eb4tswz

07/07/2025

Overlaps, patches of tone, erasures that left ghost images echoing more assertive lines, and occasional deviations from vertical and horizontal became eloquent players in subtle dramas.…Everything demanded and rewarded close attention.

—Karen Wilkin reviews Myron Stout at Peter Freeman Gallery https://tinyurl.com/2ud37r44

Image: Myron Stout, Untitled, n.d. Charcoal on Strathmore paper. 25 1/8 x 19 inches. (63.8 x 48.3 cm). PF8196. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc., New York / Paris. Photography by Justin Craun

07/01/2025

Our poetry contest is open! 1st prize: $1000 + publication, 2nd & 3rd: $500 + publication. Submit up to 5 poems; manuscripts accepted electronically at hudsonreview.com/submissions or by mail to 33 W 67th St, NY, NY 10023. Ends July 31, 2025. More info: https://tinyurl.com/53wketha

Text in image:
The Hudson Review Poetry Contest
First prize: $1,000 + publication
Second &Third Prizes: $500 + publication
No submission fee.
Limited to five poems. Contest open to poets making their first appearance in The Hudson Review. No simultaneous submissions.
www.hudsonreview.com/submissions
July 1–July 31, 2025

06/27/2025

Cervantes is always appearing and disappearing in Don Quixote. He introduces himself to us in the prologue of the novel’s first part, looking right at us…Other appearances are more fleeting, more indirect. The author is a stealthy passenger, even a stowaway, in his own novel. He comes forth and then is lost like a shadow behind his invented characters.

—From “Stealthy Cervantes,” by Antonio Muñoz Molina, tr. Jeffrey T. Bersett https://tinyurl.com/mszsmncf

06/26/2025

That is evidence of artfulness enough, I suppose; but together with Collins’ devotion to stanzas of equal length in many of the poems, here to my ear is where his poetic qualities begin and end. There is no richness of language or strangeness of vocabulary…no deep sense of musicality, no rhetorical sprezzatura or even plain old metaphor.…There is a couplet in the final section which, to me, embodies the limitations of Billy Collins’ poetry. “Longing was once a big part of poetry,” he writes, “but now it’s better to just say you’re flying.” Longing has never disappeared from life or poetry. Mere statement—just say you’re flying—goes only so far and no further in poetry.

—Bruce Whiteman reviews Water, Water by Billy Collins from Random House https://tinyurl.com/32y74m6n

06/25/2025

In his most recent novel Playground, Richard Powers continues his career-long investigations into scientific knowledge from his familiar “aerial” perspective, one in which all human speculation is conceived, in this instance, as an inherited form of “play,”…an inquisitiveness and testing things out that underpins nearly everything as a species we do, since it’s all part of the game.

—Tom Wilhelmus reviews Playground by Richard Powers from W. W. Norton & Company https://tinyurl.com/2eb4tswz

06/24/2025

Am I in the right line? The lobby’s dense
with travelers, the signage at the far end
indistinct. A man to my right seems ready
to help but slips away before I phrase
a question. As for luggage, were my bags
to go on that cart that just now fades away?
People pushing from all sides, pressing ahead.
In which pocket my passport? Am I carrying
the usual cards? I pat myself all over,
not even a wallet. Looking past the counters,
I think I glimpse water. I’d supposed tarmac
or a welter of platforms and railroad tracks.
The crowd has thinned, my luggage gone.
I have no chits, but my hands are free.
Now a riverbank, with a ferry waiting.
Should I begin to worry?

—“When We Gather at the River” by David Hamilton https://tinyurl.com/73p9ecdx

06/23/2025

On paper, the [piano part] seems undemanding; the piano burbles via a single line of sixteenth notes beneath the breathless, meandering violin melody. In performance, however, the part is notoriously difficult, for what Brahms wants from the piano is not at all pianistic. Many of the raindrops are written as repeated notes, which, if the pianist loses mental concentration and physical control for even a split second, will either fail to repeat, creating silent gaps in the rainfall, or result in an unintentional accent, disrupting its gentle flow.

—From “Music About Music” by Becky Y. Lu, on Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 1 in G Major, Op. 78 https://tinyurl.com/y6twa287

06/20/2025

It is tempting to read The Rainbow as yet another novel by a traditional male writer obsessed with the fantasy of female promiscuity and its control…Fascinatingly, written with an uncommon depth of sympathy for mothers and daughters, it is almost feminist in its exploration of the destruction wrought to women and families by not only [WWII] and its aftermath, but Japan’s deeply entrenched patriarchal social order. What finally complicates the novel’s paternalism is its self-reflexive meditation on patriarchy’s own failure to meet the needs of those in its care. And instead of the all-too-common blind and self-congratulatory prescription, the novel contemplates without closure or absolution the question of what paternal responsibility patriarchs and artists like Mizuhara can and must assume to right the destruction wrought. The novel walks a precipitous line, but it is this self-reflexivity that is most striking.

—Asako Serizawa reviews The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata, tr. by Haydn Trowell from Vintage International https://tinyurl.com/yhuavrft

06/19/2025

The chronologically installed wealth of slashing pen strokes and punctuating hits of wash, neat hatching, and delicate chalk marks includes surprises…High points of the nineteenth century include a portrait of an architect friend made by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, when he was a student at the French Academy in Rome, a vivid likeness created with fragile lines and patches of tone breathed onto the surface.

—Karen Wilkin reviews “Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art https://tinyurl.com/2ud37r44

Image: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867), Portrait of Louis-Pierre Haudebourt. Pencil on paper. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Bequest of Susannah Shickman, 2023.53.12.

06/18/2025

[Paul] Henreid, memorably heroic in Casablanca, is genuinely sinister here.…Not for the first time I was moved by the trap in which so many Central European actors of the [WWII] period found themselves: having escaped their homelands for political reasons, in England and America they were promptly boxed into roles as N***s, thanks to their accents.

—Brooke Allen reflects on Paul Henreid in Night Train to Munich (1940) https://tinyurl.com/vy5yjw56

06/17/2025

The poet herself is ever present, caught as it were in that photographic moment between the present and the past, between the work-a-day world of errands and the eternal world of Bach’s music.

—Bruce Whiteman reviews St. Matthew Passion by Gjertrud Schnackenberg from Arrowsmith Press https://tinyurl.com/32y74m6n

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