This essay repositions Vladimir Nabokov within the genealogy of historiographic metafiction. Through close readings of stories from his Berlin period and the later "Double Talk" and Pnin, the essay shows that Nabokov's fiction absorbs the surveillance culture of 1930s Germany in narrative structures that link omniscient narration with authoritarianism, suggesting the complicity of realist conventions with political repression. Pnin develops this critique further by exposing the ethical and narrative paradox of omniscient narration in the context of the Holocaust. By revealing the historicist impulse underlying Nabokov's ostensibly apolitical aesthetics, the essay suggests that the antecedents of historiographic metafiction reach back to Nabokov's early writing.
"Loving What is Not Loved" is an essay about teaching a class on AIDS. The essay is an ellipse, a locus of points around two foci: letting a person die because you don't like them and not wanting to be the object of study. The area is easy; the perimeter is not.
They're Out There grew from a love for drawing and what line can do. Beginning as a series of COVID-era video watch parties, artists Natasha Bowdoin and Sarah Welch would meet virtually, dive into the evening's feature film, and draw together. In these sessions we learned more about each other, fostering friendship, common ground, and calm in chaotic times, while sharing a mutual appreciation and skepticism for Eco-horror films. The drawing project culminated in the production of a zine alongside the exhibition Black Water, Green Fruit (Basket Books and Art, Houston, TX 2026), which featured drawings made via this exchange.
Questions of memory and forgetting are central to pandemic literary representation. I analyze influenza and COVID-related literature by Virginia Woolf, Claudia Rankine, and others, bringing this analysis together with personal reflections. The essay posits three imagery structures-miasma, competitive forgetting, and malignant symbiosis-that help illustrate the absent-present quality of these pandemics. I investigate how the literature represents pandemics as miasmic crises, ones that align (and overlap) with other vast crises, such as discrimination and ecological destruction, that are both everywhere and yet often hidden in plain sight.
In this dialogue, we read Louise Erdrich's The Sentence and Ali Smith's Companion Piece as modeling two ways of plotting the pandemic: as an artifact and as a portal, respectively. We argue that Erdrich and Smith utilize these two models to present the pandemic as predominantly a site of interpre-tation and train their reader so that they, too, can come to scrutinize the pan-demic as a narrative event. Together, we suggest The Sentence and Companion Piece open possibilities for ongoing interpretive engagement precisely where we might otherwise think the pandemic forecloses it.
