Nonfiction | June 01, 2009
What's the Matter with Houdini?
Deborah Thompson
This essay was the winning non-fiction entry in the 2009 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.
The full text of this essay is not currently available online.
I can only figure out who I am by projecting myself onto my dogs. It occurred to me on day, when performing this exercise in self-definition on my cocker spaniel, that my own, my family’s and my country’s history of interaction with cocker spaniels encapsulates our changing relationship with nature, with science, with mortality.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Nonfiction
May 17 2022
Facing It
Facing it Sally Crossley “there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” —T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock … read more
Nonfiction
May 16 2022
Oranges
Oranges Robin Reif We called it the Buffet of Dead Food: flaccid bacon, eggs—hard-boiled and cold—and toast so tough it scratched the roofs of our mouths. Still, the meal had… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 07 2022
Cover Up
Cover Up I did not begin my time in Jerusalem with the desire to be dangerous. I arrived in that most intoxicating, infuriating, enervating, derelict, and sad of cities with… read more