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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....

In Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, we are presented with the image of a man who, coughing up blood, is suspected of having cancer when an X-ray shows a spreading, rag-edged shadow on his chest When they open him up, however, they instead find a six-inch fir tree embedded and growing inside his left lung It is an image which informed a fleeting passage in my own novel, Our Wives Under The Sea (2022): a scene in which two characters read a newspaper report about a woman who eats improperly prepared seafood and unwittingly winds up with a dozen squid paralarvae incubating inside her cheek In both cases, the image unfolds from the fact of the body as site, or even as habitat, and a markedly opaque entity in either instance We are made to understand that the body, unchecked, will happily go about its business, playing host to things that ought not to be there It is a feature of broader mistrust, this sense that our physical bodies cannot be relied upon if they will keep secrets from us How, after all, is one supposed to have faith in something that claims to protect you if it chooses to withhold information of a potentially dangerous breach?   This is something I have often thought about: the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it How do you square that – the fact of the physical dark inside you? The fact that anything could be going on in there? The monster in Alien (1979) is scary because it’s a foreign object, but it’s also scary because of how easily the body accommodates it, at least for a little while   I’m obsessed with the concept of The Thing Inside The Body – the squirming something Noomi Rapace surgically

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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poetry

July 2011

Letter of a Madman

Guy de Maupassant

TR. Will Stone

poetry

July 2011

Introduction by the translator In the early hours of 2 January 1892, sensing the approach of insanity, the renowned...

fiction

May 2013

Cabbage Butterflies

Ryū Murakami

TR. Ralph McCarthy

fiction

May 2013

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids...

fiction

Issue No. 5

Sent

Joshua Cohen

fiction

Issue No. 5

These women lived in hope, they lived for the future as if they were every one of them already...

 

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