Michelle Kuo is an associate professor at the American University of Paris. Her book, Reading with Patrick (Random House, 2017) was a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Public Books, The Point, and other publications. She works on expanding justice and education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Previously, she was a clerk for a federal appellate judge and an attorney for tenants’ and workers’ rights at an organization representing immigrant communities.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Exploding Clichés: On Éric Chevillard’s Versatile Prose
Michelle Kuo, Jeremy M. Davies, and Daniel Levin Becker discuss Éric Chevillard’s pandemic writing and the challenges of rendering his style into English....
Letter from Paris
A letter for Paris by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu....
I Dare Not: The Muted Style of Writer in Exile Ha Jin
As a new generation of Chinese writer-exiles settles in the West, we wonder whether Jin’s flat, alienating style will come to be regarded as a kind of artifact, a self-preserving fossil of the trauma generated by those who witnessed the mixture of real and manufactured emotion that fueled a collective mania....
“Take the Good Life and Be Happy”: On “The Americans”
The joke of “The Americans” is that it’s quintessentially American....
Scientology: The Mystery Sandwich
AFTER FINISHING ANNA KARENINA IN 1877, Leo Tolstoy turned his attention away from creating worlds on the page to creating something ...
Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan
The evolution of the flâneur...
In Hell, "We Shall Be Free": On "Breaking Bad"
Walter White's Rebellion...
Marilynne Robinson and the Miraculous Privilege of Existence
"For Robinson, America has declined because of pervasive and corrosive ideologies that ascribe human motivation solely to self-interest."...
