Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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The Butterfly Effect
At The New Republic, Laura Marsh examines the interplay—or lack thereof—between Nabokov’s identities as a writer and a lepidopterist. In her investigative and detailed cataloguing of scientific and literary happenings, her only steadfast finding may be this: “There’s a special…
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What We Talk About When We Talk About The Avant-Garde
What are we trying to signal to potential readers when we call a work or its author “avant-garde?” The term is lately used to foreground a studied and even exclusionary difficulty in the writing, but what about its potential as…
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The Last Pilot
Most writers have imagined the scene of their own death—in the hopes of stylizing the moment or savoring the thought of someone sifting through and publishing their old manuscripts. It seems that James Tate, even in death, outdid us all…
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Burned In The Melting Pot
At Guernica, Sara Nović condemns the linguistic dismissal of American Sign Language and questions the overwhelming primacy of spoken English. She attributes this erasure of Deaf culture not only to widespread misconceptions about disability, but also to the insatiable American desire…
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A Portable James Baldwin
I came to her place to take a picture of Baldwin’s typewriter. This is what I told her. But I think I also came because I wanted to see someone who is his flesh and blood. I wanted to see…
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Ponce de León, You Are Not the Forefather
Aside from a few shared scribbles of genetic code, it is difficult to say exactly what keeps us tethered to our distant ancestors. Over at Oxford American, Alex Mar thinks through the implications of incorporating these stories into our personal…