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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction to See What Can Be Done that, at the start of her career, she couldn’t turn down book reviews Likewise, I shouldn’t be doing this but I am There is no introduction more fitting to Moore’s work than the sentence: ‘I shouldn’t be doing this’ Presently, announcing my love for her feels like a quaint throwback, like expressing my admiration for the microwave If this were a love affair I would be showing up late at night, keeping it quiet, cautiously saying, ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m here’ But I would be showing up Anyway, you need to read only one page of her, one paragraph, to know that those relationships, the faintly disastrous and embarrassing, are the ones you don’t get over   Moore is not a particularly demonstrative writer, not didactic, and she communicates no clear, distinct vision of the world She’s interested in confusion, in what she terms ‘elegant wrongness’ She has a relatively slim output in comparison to others, five story collections and two novels, only one of them of significant length (Gate at the Stairs, but I prefer her first, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?) The art form she most succeeds at is the shyest – the short story The second art form she truly succeeds at is the book review, where she obscures herself and hides in the back, behind a list of bigger names: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo So what’s to be taken from her first collection of essays, criticism and commentary, gathered over her thirty-year career?   Firstly, before matters of the heart, practical business – how to read this brick? I grouped the pieces into book criticism, then her work on television and film, her political pieces then, finally, music I left the autobiography to last But what’s to be taken from this book, really? With Moore, I think there is always that italicised ‘really’ How did it really feel – not how was it supposed to feel, not how did it sound, but how did it really feel? She would baulk at the idea that

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

May 2012

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2012

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated...

fiction

June 2015

Hollow Heart

Viola Di Grado

TR. Antony Shugaar

fiction

June 2015

2011   I. In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself.   On July 23, at 3:29 in the...

Interview

February 2015

Interview with Eddie Peake

Lily Le Brun

Interview

February 2015

Like many people, I had seen Eddie Peake’s penis long before I met the artist himself. For several years...

 

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