Writing
Essays, reviews, and the occasional manifesto.
My essays have appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, SAQ, and Partisan Review, alongside academic journals. These are some favorites — mostly from places that reach general readers, my favorite kind.
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Critical Inquiry
A review of The Cancel Culture Panic
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Novel
Experimental Critical Writing
What I think of as my manifesto — and, ironically, the one piece the original publisher won’t let me reproduce. A taste is free; the whole thing needs JSTOR.
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Avidly / Los Angeles Review of Books
Recipe for Memory
How Italian American family recipes — eggplant parmigiana, and a recipe for sfingi that had gone missing — became a way through grief.
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Avidly / Los Angeles Review of Books
The Allure of Lost Cities
Why empty cities both fascinate and frighten us, and what they tell us about how fragile a civilization is.
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Creative Nonfiction, Duquesne University
Selling the House
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The opening section of Crossing Back
How Not to Read the Classics
A chain-smoking teacher, a sick baby, and three readings of the Odyssey across a lifetime — of renewed interest since Christopher Nolan’s film.
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NAS Journal
The Bomb and Climate Catastrophe in Fact and Fiction
Two ways of imagining the end of the world, and what fiction does with each.
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