Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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Is This Water?
Graduation season is upon us again, and with it comes the vacant, cliché-ridden literary animal that is the graduation speech. Over at Lit Hub, Emily Harnett revisits David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” and marvels at…
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Grey Matters
This is how it started: Falling into the spaces between words, between ideas, between sentences. An infinite elbowing out of time, and time and space between. Gaps upon gaps upon gaps upon gaps. Reaching for the next sentence and then,…
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Homeward Unbound
Some would argue that the loss of privacy is a small price to pay to have your voice heard on an international scale. But over at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes honestly and unpretentiously about his difficulties returning home as a prominent…
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Drawing a Line
Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is, in practice, evacuated of meaning. For The New Inquiry, Aaron…
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Mind Over Genre
Over at Lit Hub, Jennifer R. Bernstein confronts the disciplinary rift that has grown between psychology and literature to show how the two are linked, even nested inside one another in our studies of self and pain: For these authors…
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How A Neighborhood is Made
For The Towner, Chantal Clarke muses on the in-betweenness of her childhood home of Pelham, New York and “the day-to-day policing of boundaries” that make up the seedy work of orchestrating a neighborhood—how it was not New York City; not…
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The Faces of The Face on the Milk Carton
The YA novel The Face on The Milk Carton has marked a thrilling yet disturbing rite of passage for many young readers over the past 25 years, iconic right down to its simple, haunting cover—which many of those readers could…
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The Storytelling of 🙂 😉 D:
It’s hard to imagine a book written entirely in emoji that isn’t just about the conceit of writing an entire book in emoji, perhaps marketed as an Urban Outfitters coffee table book for guests to alternately smirk and groan at.…
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Harvesting Our Desires
What can the medium of the video game tell us about our collective desires as a society? According to Alfie Brown’s essay for The New Inquiry, a lot actually. The author details how our fascinations with apocalypse gaming and pastoral…
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12 Lol-Worthy Gifs That Will Recuperate Feminist Praxis
Bitch is where many of today’s feminist internet denizens (yours truly included) got our start reading and writing about culture with a critical eye. In many ways, Zeisler’s book is a call to arms, asking us to return to a…
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Sontag Syndrome
Over at Hazlitt, Alana Massey walks us through the anxiety that so often accompanies reading great thinkers, laying bare her own insecurities at the altar of famed writer and critic, Susan Sontag. When she finally does sit down to read…
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A Poet’s Arrival
The New Yorker profiles Ocean Vuong, who muses on the English language, growing up around women, Frank O’Hara, and the vestigial nature of clichés. And with his first book of poetry published just last week, he addresses the feelings of strangeness…