The Hudson Review

09/10/2025

The British import Operation Mincemeat raises the originality stakes by yet another notch. This alternately goofy and heartfelt musical is based on a true story, but that story is so outlandish, and the show’s approach so surprising, that the result feels like nothing you’ve seen before…the musical recounts an actual World War II operation in which a team of MI5 agents planted fake documents on a co**se, misleading the N***s about the location of the Allied invasion of Italy.

—Erick Neher reviews Operation Mincemeat https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/celebrating-originality-in-broadways-musical-lineup/

Image: Cast of Operation Mincemeat. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

09/09/2025

It’s not until the two final volumes of the sequence—Mother’s Milk and At Last—where St. Aubyn’s brilliance as a comic writer comes into full play.…The verbal feats are presented by a narrative imagination that, in its human richness, is hard to live up to.

—William H. Pritchard reviews The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn from Everyman's Library https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/st-aubyn-reconsidered/

09/08/2025

Mercy, by Joan Silber, isn’t a novel, in my opinion, it’s a novel-in-stories, or a collection of linked stories. Whatever it is—and who really cares—it had me at page one. A daisy chain of characters connected either intimately or remotely or not at all tell their stories over many years…It’s about six characters, finely drawn, who live vital and captivating lives.

—Louise Marburg reviews Mercy by Joan Silber from Counterpoint Press https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/ode-to-the-indies/

09/05/2025

Iconoclast, titan, maverick. Even when it is not his centennial year, such superlatives to describe Pierre Boulez abound. These brash identities, however, are arguably informed by his writings rather than his music.…Few were as prolific as Boulez about writing their scathing judgments down. He has excoriated Arnold Schoenberg for being “useless” in an essay written a few months after his death, because the inventor of serialism had mixed his new, modern musical language with old, classical and pre-classical formal structures. Maurice Ravel was a “‘fake academician’” for dressing up “extremely simple progressions.” Béla Bartók, who absorbed his influences “rather superficially,” was too eclectic to have an authentic creative voice. Notoriously contradictory, Boulez has walked back as many severe pronouncements as he has made, even if not on paper. As a conductor and performer, he was a champion of these composers, and many others.

—Becky Y. Lu on Pierre Boulez https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/rethinking-boulez/

Arts Review Subscriber Only Rethinking Boulez by Becky Y. Lu Iconoclast, titan, maverick. Even when it is not his centennial year, such superlatives to describe Pierre Boulez abound. These brash identities, however, are arguably informed by his writings rather than his music. Many composers were n...

09/02/2025

Our fiction contest is open! Submit a story of up to 10,000 words online at hudsonreview.com/submissions by 11:59 p.m. on November 30, 2025. 1st prize: $1,000 + publication; 2nd & 3rd: $500 + publication. As always there is NO FEE to submit.

The contest is open to writers never before published in The Hudson Review (anywhere else is fine!), but the story submitted must not have been published anywhere (including online, such as on a blog or social media). Open to both US and international submissions. There is no theme.

Find our guidelines, stories by previous winners (free to read), and a link to submit here: https://hudsonreview.com/news-events/short-fiction-contest-opens-september-1-2025/

08/29/2025

…My sneakers dug in sand
trackless, with cracked ice, as I remembered
years back, how you and I ran down to sea,
laughing. I thought not much of death,

nor after that, until the day you fell.
I could not lift you. Waiting for the ambulance,
I studied your face and touched your bony
shoulders…

—From “Whale” by Grace Schulman. Read the rest, free to nonsubscribers: https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/whale-murmuration/

08/28/2025

The desire for a name that connects to ancestry is a central preoccupation…[In the final section] poems are written in a form of Paschen’s devising: three columns of Osage, phonetic translation and English. It is visually arresting on the page; the columns create an impression of fording a stream, with the italicized phonetics the means of crossing from one bank to the other.

—Lorna Knowles Blake reviews Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen from Red Hen Press https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/what-draws-us-together/

08/27/2025

There had to have been a point
when everything transformed:
some line in the sand crossed,
some liminality.
Isn’t a gate a door?
A threshold. There you are.
There had to have been a moment,
the after and before:
no war gave way to war.

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

08/26/2025

Even though the two central characters are robots, the story is, at base, an exploration of the nuanced uncertainties and joys of human connection. What might initially seem like a sentimental oddity evolves into a meditation on memory, mortality and the desire—perhaps the right—to love and be loved. The show suggests that even machines may be haunted by the echo of a happy ending.

—Erick Neher reviews Maybe Happy Ending https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/celebrating-originality-in-broadways-musical-lineup/

Image: Helen J. Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

08/25/2025

Lerner clearly has a rich imagination. I’ve found myself recommending Ring to my more curious friends simply because I’ve never read anything like it.

—Louise Marburg reviews Ring by Michelle Lerner from Bancroft Press https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/ode-to-the-indies/

08/22/2025

Karen Wilkin reviews The Frick Collection back at its original home, and its exhibition:

Now it is just as exciting to see things back where they have always been, against refreshed and remade backgrounds, in vastly improved lighting. The wall coverings look pristine and opulent; the passementerie is astonishing; existing light fixtures have been rewired to accommodate state-of-the-art technology sans changes, with occasional subtle additions...

New temporary exhibition galleries...were inaugurated in June by “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” [uniting] three celebrated paintings of women with their maids, with letters suggesting related narratives; each canvas is from a different period, each is a different size, and each composition explores a different spatial concept…This small, perfect exhibition will undoubtedly be uncomfortably crowded…but it’s worth standing one’s ground to concentrate.

Read the rest, free to nonsubscribers: https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/at-the-galleries-56/

Image: Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Mistress and Maid, ca. 1664–67, oil on canvas, 35 ½ x 31 in. (90.2 x 78.7 cm), The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

08/21/2025

I have lived long enough to have listened to rain
put out a bonfire, a slow rain, hiss after hiss,

a fire that my neighbor made, then jumped over
laughing. Have stood back and looked on

as if with a whiskbroom rain swept the coals
in from the edges, making a bright little pile

at the center that made a last effort to flame up
before taking down and folding its flags.

Have seen the gray ashes blacken with rain
and my neighbor grow old while I too grew old,

walking away under the rain, now and then
turning, like this, to look over my shoulder.

—“Another Summer Solstice” by Ted Kooser. Read this and another of his poems, free to nonsubscribers: https://hudsonreview.com/2025/08/at-sunday-morning-aa-another-summer-solstice/