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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....

‘I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that people or characters can suddenly undergo deep and genuine change, or that radical change and true epiphanies are common,’ Jamel Brinkley told an interviewer last summer, when his debut short story collection, A LUCKY MAN, was published in the United States ‘But’, he continued, ‘I am completely faithful to the idea that there are moments when we can be profoundly shaken’ In these nine memorable stories Brinkley shakes each of his main characters in turn, and we, as we read, are shaken too   That shaking often has its roots in sex, an act that typically plays out very differently in the minds of Brinkley’s characters than in reality In the opening story, ‘No More Than a Bubble’, two men walk a pair of women home from a house party At the party the men, second-year student gatecrashers surrounded by recent graduates, are convinced they are looking through a window into ‘the next phase of life’, where the booze and weed are more potent, and the women wear ‘better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew’   After a long, strange night, the foursome finally ‘arrive at sex’ (the verb conveys the dogged, low-speed pursuit the men have enacted in order to reach this destination), but not in the way the men wanted The women make them undress first, and insist they regard each other’s nakedness ‘There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted’, one of the women says, but this shared experience doesn’t draw the two friends together; it drives them apart They are too wrapped up in their roles as young black men (‘We both preferred girls of a certain plumpness, with curves – in part, I think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like’) to even consider a thought so radical, for them at least, as enjoying, or even acknowledging in any intimate sense, another male body Yet the sense lingers that their disgust is at least partly alloyed with desire   Throughout the story these men wear a series of masks, and depictions of black masculinity as a performative

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

Issue No. 13

Interview with Michel Faber

Anna Aslanyan

Interview

Issue No. 13

MICHEL FABER’S RANGE OF SUBJECTS – from child abuse to drug abuse, from avant-garde music to leaking houses – is as...

feature

January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

feature

January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

Art

June 2012

'The Freedom of Speech Itself', or the betrayal of the voice

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art

June 2012

‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only...

 

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