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

Articles Available Online


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....

Catherine Lacey is a writer who came to New York by way of Tupelo, Mississippi She is a New York Foundation of the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a Granta New Voice Lacey broke from the peloton last year with her debut novel, Nobody is Ever Missing (Granta) Her work struck me immediately for its synthesis of two qualities of prose which often exclude one another: distinctive voice and rich imagery   Nobody is Ever Missing follows Elyria from a stable but stagnant marriage to the wide-open possibilities of New Zealand As Elyria hitchhikes through the countryside, with only a scrap of a plan, she turns and returns memories of a lost stepsister and an absent husband The more Elyria travels, the more she struggles with the impossibility of running from yourself, calling this feeling her ‘wildebeest’ All this roiling introspection might have been too much in another writer’s hands But Catherine Lacey invigorates self-examination with prose that is alive and electric It’s the bright bristling reality of Elly’s world that makes Nobody is Ever Missing so significant   The novel teems with metaphor and metonymy—images do the work in progressing our understanding of Elyria’s mind and her trajectory The body becomes strange in these pages: hands become a metonym for love; we consider the possibility of living with two hearts; teeth are alternatively tiny, glowing and bared; the brain is animate and other, sometimes roving and acquisitive, sometimes lying calm and still in the dark Imagery, line-by-line, keeps at bay the claustrophobia that typically accompanies an exploration of feelings or an anatomization of body The reading experience is akin to waking up behind someone else’s eyes and feeling like if you tell anyone about it, you’ll find psychiatrists medicating your future You kind of want to keep this book a secret But you also want to tell everyone you meet to experience Elly’s voice   Catherine and I first met this year when paired together for a blind interview between debut novelists We recently talked about writing and life at the bar of Roebling Tea Room in Brooklyn We continued the conversation electronically the next

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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fiction

January 2014

Leg over Leg

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

TR. Humphrey Davies

fiction

January 2014

First published in 1855, Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fāriyāq,’ alter ego of...

Art

May 2017

Francis Upritchard

Filipa Ramos

Art

May 2017

Where do anthropology and archaeology meet? Do the study of humankind and the research of its material culture share...

poetry

Issue No. 13

Watermen

Holly Pester

poetry

Issue No. 13

It’s Saturday and two men arrive at the door in the uniform. Thames Water. We’re checking the whole street,...

 

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