Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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On the Road
In his monthly series “The Lives of Others” over at the Paris Review, Edward White introduces us to globe-trotting Turkish writer, Evliya Çelebi, and the esoteric but lively book of travel stories he penned almost four centuries ago: Evliya so adored…
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You Are Here
Nabokov understood the seduction of maps as a way of ordering the fantastic, the disorderly, the sometimes contradictory nature of description, a visual aid to the internal eye. For Lit Hub, Susan Daitch gives a sweeping textual overview of the…
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A Eulogy for the Eulogy
Twentieth century philosopher J.L. Austin asked in his writing what words and phrases could do in their utterance. In this tradition, Nick Ripatrazone examines Morgan Meis and Stefanie Anne Goldberg’s fictionalized eulogy collection, Dead People, to find out what the…
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A Poem That Sounds Like How the World Is
In an interview at Lit Hub, Tommy Pico speaks candidly about the forces that drive his poetic process, the ways in which we police one another’s poetry with our preconceived notions of the genre, and the subsequent importance of writing in…
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It Was an Honor Just to Be Nominated
We would all love to pretend that we’re above the euphoric rush of gaining approval. But winning feels good, and writing that truth in its fullness is a key step to understanding it. For the Guardian, Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his…
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Sorry, Who?
Pop culture has been a steadfast element of public life for a while, but it feels like lately there’s even more pressure to keep up with a certain caché of writers, movies, TV shows, artists, and events. At The Hairpin,…
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Reading Between the Lines
Life, the book. The long gay book. / Do you remember? Should you remember? / What are our stories about? In an essay for Lit Hub, Matthew Cheney narrates growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the intertwined relationships between…
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Putting Home into Words
It would have been almost impossible for me to resist Brazil forever. Given my love for black people and fascination with our stories, Brazil’s paramount importance in the historical trans-Atlantic slave trade and its contemporary role as a cultural and…
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Making the Fantasy a Reality
It’s particularly pleasurable to read interview between writers who know each other well. Over at Oxford American, long-time friends Ada Limón and Manuel Gonzales discuss Gonzales’s new novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack, and what it means to write…
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Sitting Pretty
With a flair for the both the juiciest and most humanizing parts of the story, Soraya Roberts over at Hazlitt pens a sweeping indictment of/love letter to John Hughes: Thirty years on, however, we’ve dropped the rose-coloured glasses, and our…
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Breaking the Script
There’s a tendency to take writers who write about race and shuffle them into a genre, into a predetermined conversation, whether they wanted to be there or not. But even if the constraints of the game are rigged, what Jenny…
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Mommy Dearest
We have an unfortunate tendency to let motherhood eclipse all aspects of a person’s identity—and then to turn around and call motherhood a faulty aspiration. Luckily there are moms like Antonia Malchik who write anyway, and implore us to remember moms like Elinore Pruitt…