Jamie Parra is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is working on a dissertation entitled “Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters.”
Jamie Parra
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Writing on Public Books
Dream Girls
Hilton Als’s White Girls is a disorienting book. If traditional biography aspires to capture the person behind the scrim of myth, Als prefers to linger on the scrim itself—the fantasy, the persona, the aura of celebrity—the fiction. His essay on Truman Capote focuses on the writer’s public image, beginning with the famous book-jacket photo of […]
