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Byline: Emily Lever

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Neighbors with Nazis

Fernand Lépinay is a friend of my grandparents who lives outside of the small town of Laigle in the rainy Orne department of Lower Normandy.

by Emily Lever on May 4, 2015August 11, 2015

Grammar and Power

The politics of slang, from Nabokov to Twitter

by Emily Lever on April 12, 2015April 12, 2015

Post-Thesis Life

Your thesis will get written, I promise. It will never be as good as they told you it was supposed to be.

by Emily Lever on April 4, 2015June 10, 2015

Dora’s Ghost

Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s most famous novel, Dora Bruder, is something like a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. It is a ghostly story about a young man and a nation haunted by history. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014, the fifteenth French writer to do so after the 2008 laureate Jean- Marie Georges Le Clézio. While Le Clézio’s writing is sensual and tinted with exoticism, Modiano’s is sparse, introspective, and heav- ily autobiographical, sometimes even termed “autofiction.”

by Emily Lever on February 15, 2015February 21, 2015

M[]ss[]ss[]pp[] R[]ver

My hands that snatch and swat go numb.

by Emily Lever on February 14, 2015February 16, 2015

Spray It, Don’t Say It

The first graffiti I ever saw were unremarkable messages etched into my middle school’s peeling wooden desks: people’s initials conjoined inside hearts, a mysterious pointy S shape, and invitations to “put an x if youre bored.”

by Emily Lever on December 6, 2014February 7, 2015

On Screens & Esteem

One day this summer, sitting in a blank white apartment that was not mine, I felt a strange weariness. This apartment was full of more books than I will probably ever read and I had fellowships to apply to and emails to write and the whole Internet in front of me and all of New York City clamoring outside.

by Emily Lever on October 18, 2014November 9, 2014

Pandora Speaks

Who would have given a damn about me if not for that box?

As punishment for Prometheus’ gift of fire, the gods gave me to men. They gave me to men. I was a poisoned gift. But the importance of a poisoned gift is the venom it bears, not the gift. The box, not Pandora.

by Emily Lever on October 11, 2014October 12, 2014

The Unexpected Bodies

It was 9 a.m. Awakened, as I often am, by sunlight, I opened my door to go to the bathroom downstairs. Supine, to the side of my door, was a male form, blonde and muscular and naked. His hands were cupped over his genitals, his underwear crumpled by his head. His eyes were closed. I froze in surprise, but I had to pee, and out of some ingrained politeness didn’t want to disturb him. I stepped over him quietly and went downstairs.

by Emily Lever, Hannah Hirsh, Megan Tung, Nick Sexton, Olivia Lloyd, Susannah Sharpless on October 11, 2014October 12, 2014

The Inheritance of Guilt

My father’s father flew free from the depths of the Russian Empire as an infant, for sticks and stones and angry Christians drove his family out. It was in 1916 or maybe 1917.

by Emily Lever on April 26, 2014July 5, 2014

Food Diary

The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”

by Emily Lever, Rachel Stone on March 30, 2014April 6, 2014

Cock Blocking

A justification for the unglamorous, unpopular, but all too necessary role of the cock blocker.

by Emily Lever on March 8, 2014March 11, 2014


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