Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by M.C. Mah
A Year in Reading: Anjali Enjeti
First, a confession: I read fewer books during the first year of the pandemic than any other time in my reading life. It was easier for me to catch up on episodes of Shahs of Sunset than crack open a book. My mind was a sieve, struggling to sift through language and meaning. Many days, I found myself too spent to glance at the pile on my nightstand. In the summer of 2021, when Covid cases declined and my youngest child became eligible for the vaccine, reading slowly seeped its way back into my life.
A Year in Reading: M.C. Mah
Standing athwart the evident passage of a year, shuddering, “No.” Never have I claimed to be well-read; I exhibit reading behavior. Taking honest account of it feels akin to my book of the year 2017, Alissa Nutting’s “Grub Street Diet,” wherein she wrote, “I like texture more than flavor.” Because I tend to read what’s in the vending machine.
On Refuge - The Millions
When I was 18, I left home and moved to the big city. There's nothing unusual in that. For me, though, there was no going back. That same year my father changed jobs. The whole family moved. It was four decades before I would see my childhood home again. When I revisited it last spring it was to celebrate the British publication of my novel, which is set in and around a great country house in rural England, very like the one where my father worked as land-agent, or manager of the estate.
Travesty and American Usage
The Mourners The summer that we lived in Florida accidentally, my husband’s mother’s friend’s son hanged himself in his Montana art studio. I am close with my mother-in-law, but I hardly knew her friend. I’d met her son just once. He’d lived in New York and studied art before moving west. He moved for the cheap housing, the sky and landscape, maybe a girlfriend. I’d met him at a party a couple of years before. He was New York artist, young, successful, charming. He’d worn a cowboy hat.
In Order to Live: Story Structure in the Horoscopic Style
In the late 12th century, the father of teenage Leonardo Fibonacci takes him off the North African streets and sets him at the feet of gruff Arab tutors. They can’t help it — they like the kid, who they can tell is going to be a nightmare until they agree to teach him the Art of Nine Symbols. Back in Pisa, Fibonacci discovers an axiomatic sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21).
Years with Yoko - The Millions
1. A few weeks ago I took a break from reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to visit the block of Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village where Jacobs lived when she wrote her classic book on urban planning.
McGlue - Ottessa Moshfegh
[Fence; 2014] Caught stealing silver spoons, you can go to jail, or you can go to sea. Which makes a sailor out of McGlue. Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel seems to use a classic plot driver: Johnson’s dead, McGlue stands accused. Does McGlue set about straightening the record? What record? Locked in the hole, McGlue is very hazy about what’s happened to him recently — only Johnson and McGlue go back much further than that. His shipmates insist: he killed his best friend.
Love and Loss and Grief and More Love: On Self-Help Literature
When I was 21, three weeks after I'd moved to San Francisco to live with my boyfriend Stephen, his lung collapsed on the way to a party. He was casual about it-he had cystic fibrosis, and though he'd only had one health crisis before this moment, he wasn't surprised. I panicked and went into a coughing fit. The next morning, we headed over to the hospital at UCSF, and began the part of our life together for which there was no map. That evening, home alone, I wandered around our living room.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with M.C.
Contact M.C., search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack