Hello. 

I write about life and about books—ideally both at the same time. I write essays, book reviews, and experimental nonfiction.

I’m working on a nonfiction book, represented by Elias Altman, Massie McQuilkin &Altman Literary Agents. Since 2024, I serve as the associate editor for nonfiction at the Exposition Review, a literary magazine based in Los Angeles.

In my career, I’m a full-time copywriter at Wells Fargo. I ride a bicycle to work, even though I live in L.A.

 

Here is my archive.

 

2024

“Lithium is the new gold.” A piece of faux-nonfiction in the style of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Published on Across the Margin.

“Prozac Nation, Revisited.” A personal essay about Elizabeth Wurtzel and the classical memoir plot. Published in Hobart.

“This is California, too.” Mystery-essay set on a scorched cycling path somewhere in East Los Angeles. Published in Press Pause, vol. 9.

image of a woman in her late thirties with long hair wearing a backpack, a silk scarf, a baseball cap, and a sequin spaghetti strap dress

I was an official artist at the 2024 Bombay Beach Biennale in the Coachella valley, where I made Nonfiction Circle, a site-specific piece of performative writing. Here’s a selfie from the day.

 

2023

“Dysmorphia, ‘degenerate’ art, and the dormancy of toxic thoughts.” Book-review-essay in The Smart Set.

“A murky unlearning: Sophocles and the Greek art of Failure.” An essay about Halberstam, Kae Tempest and the Philoctetes. In The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory.

2022

“Delia Derbyshire, or the queen of electronic music.” A book review of Re-Sisters by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Published by Louder Than War.

“We were all Nobody once.” Academic review on a book on the life, work, and memoirs of classicist E.R. Dodds. Published in The Classical Review.

2019

Book: Classical Literature and Posthumanism, a collection of essays co-edited with GM Chesi. Bloomsbury, 480pp.

Essay: “Theoretical introduction: the subject of the human,” co-written with GM Chesi.

Essay: “Malfunctions of Embodiment: Man/Weapon Agency and the Greek Ideology of Masculinity.” 

Translation: “How to Become a Cyborg.”  Bloomsbury.

Review: Feminist clowns and fairy tale in Bait: Kill the Princess. In Broadway Baby.

Review: Butch Princesa by Andrea Spisto. In Broadway Baby.

2018

Book review on props and physical objects in ancient Greek theater. In Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

2017

Film review: the tragedy of reality TV fame. Mia Spengler’s film drama Back for Good at the Berlin Film Festival.

Film review. Discreet, Travis Matthews’ ballad to gay Texans (Berlin Film Festival)

Golden Exits fails to glisten at the 2017 Berlinale.

2016

Dissertation: Ph.D. thesis on the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles. Exclusion in Sophocles.

Essay: “Not even his dead body: Polyneices, the excluded brother.” in Occupy Antigone. Peter Narr Press.

Poem: “Saint Giles.” in Poetry Nights III – an anthology, published and edited by The Soho Society Club.

2015

Book review: On family secrets, and the millennial London bedsit life. Kat Gordon, The Artificial Anatomy of Parks.

Book review: Millennial admin temp life in Alice Furse’s office novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Interview: Biographer Clifford Slapper on the life of Mike Garson. Bowie’s Piano Man.

Book review: The Berlin Diaries by Noel Maurice. Remembrance of the 1990s.

2014

Interview: Lauren Oyler on writing Berlin.

Book review: A 1970s childhood in Thatcher’s Britain. Springfield Road by Salena Godden.

2013

Essay: “‘Our Mind Is the Ancient Proteus’: Proust, the Poets, and the Sea.” in the collection: Transformative Change in Western Thought: Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood. Routledge.

2012

Book review: on staged murders and reported deaths in Greek tragedy. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

2011

Book review: War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz. For the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Essay: on Marcel Proust in faux-Pompeii. “In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii.” Oxford University Press.

Greek lyric arrangement: Brian Elias’ Electra Mourns–premiered at BBC Proms, 2012

2009

Translation: “Books and Literacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies.

 

Bio

I was born in Berlin, Germany, and studied Classics in London and at Yale. I worked a few years in London, then wrote my PhD on the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, back in Berlin. I taught in the Classics department of Humboldt University, a place filled with the bronze busts, portraits and figureheads of great classical linguists and historians; I also taught at the center for Gender studies.

But something pulled me to Finance—maybe it was London, where the financial services industry breathes its influence into every last corner of every little street. So I first joined a venture capital firm, where I did Press, and worked with financial journalists. Then, I moved to California, where currently I’m a corporate writer at Wells Fargo, the bank that began as a stagecoach hauling gold in the Old West.

I’m always scribbling at some book review, essay, literary concept art or experimental hybrid work. I collect and curate the best stranger-than-fiction nonfiction in my (very occasional) newsletter, The Glossy Ruin Quarterly.

Glossy Ruin Quarterly

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