In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…
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Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text
In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: Seeing Double: Editors in Postwar American Literature
When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
On Lipstick Lesbians, Feminine Suffering, and Aspirational Idiocy
When I was sixteen, I only wanted one thing: to be fucking sexy. I did not achieve this. It was 2013, and I was just a suburban teen, wearing a…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
The American Bimbo as a Site of Spiritual Struggle
Two days after shaving my head down to the skin with the help of my roommate and a BIC razor, I fell asleep on our couch while watching cable TV….
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Have We Learned Anything?
In late November 2006, I was knee-deep in my daughter’s toddlerhood, still getting used to the new body I’d found myself in. A little rounder in the middle, breasts still…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
On Twinning: The Parent Trap, The Hiltons, and the White Girls Who Raised Me
Once, at ten, I cut a tuft of my hair with a pair of craft scissors. I had just re-watched The Parent Trap and was mesmerized still by that red-headed…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Neither sexy, cool, nor smart
§1 It was, intellectually and politically, a dark time: 2005. In Miami Beach, a nineteen-year-old with “a rhinestone Playboy bunny ring, white stilettos that laced in tight X’s up her…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Lindsay Lohan’s Splashy, Sensationalized Journey To Sobriety
Our story begins in 2006, on the eve of Lindsay Lohan’s first DUI, with fourteen-year-old me weeping over the fact that I was neither rich nor famous. “She has no…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Introduction
In college, I purchased a set of heart-shaped friendship necklaces on Etsy. Entrapped in each pendant was a girl caught in flashbulb glare, all feral eyes and shiny hair. In…