Essays
Two Dozen Dancers: Representing a Masterpiece
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, sets its Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at the end of the second-floor hallway above its Fenway entrance. With her Egyptian-god stance and silk tutu…
With Each Breath: A Memoir of Survival
Code blue in room 241. The announcement is made in an unhurried, neutral tone. Code blue in room 241. I push my food away, jump up, heave open the heavy…
Reverse Migration
After our month-long travels across southeastern Europe, Rowan and I arrived at my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment in Ankara ready for a home-cooked meal. We were (over) fed in typical…
Garip: A Turkish Poetry Manifesto (1941)
The Critical Flame is thrilled to present the first English publication of Melih Cevdet Anday, Oktay Rifat, and Orhan Veli’s revolutionary poetry manifesto, Garip, which appeared in Turkish in 1941. The manifesto…
The Space Between: A Personal Essay of Anorexia
The history of anorexia as a phenomenon is unclear, but the term “anorexia” seems to have become popularized in the Western lexicon sometime in the early nineteen eighties, as a…
Line of Sight: Lineage as Vision
They wrote as women write, not as men, writes Virginia Woolf of Jane Austin and Emily Brontë in 1928. What does it mean to write as a woman? Is it…
The last Americans in Palmyra
The ruins of Palmyra. “All the sacred Mysteries of Asia, with their strident music, served now to add to this voluptuous unrest … I felt only disgust and abhorrence for all…
The History of the Wanderer
When I was four my family moved from our modest ranch house in Florissant, Missouri, to a larger two story home on an acre of land in Fairfax, Virginia. This…
With William Dean Howells to Florence
For the modern traveler, the road often leads to Florence. From a cruise ship moored in Livorno, it’s possible to inspect the Duomo, buy some souvenirs on the Ponte Vecchio,…