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,…
Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
66 posts
Theodora Messalas is a New York-based writer and editor who could easily be talked into going to grad school.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…