Publications
essays
Dispatches from a Pandemic: Strasbourg
Essay in Harvard Review Online, 2020"I stand in front of store shelves containing tahini, peanut butter, almond butter, five brands of hazelnut-and-chocolate spread and I think, Am I crazy? Everything seems so normal."
The Ethics of Investigation: An Interview with Jessica McDiarmid
Interview in Harvard Review Online, 2020"Writers of narrative nonfiction often appear as a character in their works. You’ve bucked this trend in Highway of Tears by appearing only in the introduction and the final chapters."
Bridge and Tunnel
Essay in Harvard Review 53, 2018"At ten minutes before noon in mid-August, the kilometer-long Morandi suspension bridge on the A10 highway west of Genoa split apart in a torrential rainstorm."
Fire at the Institut d'Égypte
Essay in Errant Magazine, 2013“'Are you spying on us?' The tall boy with curly dark hair is laughing even as he asks the question."
Italian Beach on the Auction Block
Essay in Errant Magazine, 2013"Stefania Longheu stands up from the lifeguard’s chair and makes her way up the beach towards Calabasciu..."
I Am Not Marlene Dietrich
Essay in Descant magazine (Toronto, vol. 166), 2014"The first sentence I learned in German, before even thinking of moving to Berlin, was 'The wind is icy.'"
fiction
book reviews
Tamar Glouberman's Chasing Rivers: A Whitewater Life
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2024"The concept of freedom turns up in a lot of songs, poems, and other narratives, but as the philosophers say, there’s freedom to and freedom from."
Deborah Campbell's A Disappearance in Damascus
Book review/essay in Harvard Review Online, 2017“For a conflict journalist, the repercussions are too grave to take narrative liberties."
Magda Szabó's Iza's Ballad
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2017“In 1949, Szabó received one of Hungary’s highest literary honors, the Baumgarten prize, only to have it withdrawn that same day as she was declared an enemy of the new Communist state. Her books would be blocked from publication for the next seven years."
Colum McCann's Thirteen Ways of Looking
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2016“Right from the title story/novella, "Thirteen Ways of Looking," with the stanzas of the Wallace Stevens poem as its chapter epigraphs, Colum McCann immerses the reader in a prose that acknowledges all the senses, yet best loves the sound of words."
Gladys Schmitt's Collected Stories
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2016“Schmitt’s marriages are often composed of intelligent homemaking women and their professorial husbands in university towns, but we are still a long way from Edward Albee."
Kevin Barry's Dark Lies the Island
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2015"As the floodwaters rise and the crowd moves to the second-floor bar, Barry’s timing turns comic and his sentences shrink to single beats before expanding again..."
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book Two
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2015“Discussion of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series often breaks down into dichotomies: is it a new hybrid genre or self-centered blathering?"
Mark Chiusano's Marine Park
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2014“Marine Park is eleven avenues long (if you count generously) and seventeen short blocks wide, and Mark Chiusano is its storyteller..."
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book One
Book review in Harvard Review Online, 2014“Book One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s much-discussed six-volume series, Min kamp (My Struggle), captures the pulse and tempo of being alive."
About
Ophelia John studied architecture at the University of Texas at Austin (MArch), editing at the Harvard Extension School, and writing at the University of British Columbia (MFA).