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James Marcus

James Marcus is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut (New Press, 2005) and seven translations of works in Italian, including Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel (Melville House, 2011). He is the former editor of Harper’s and has contributed to the New Yorker, the American Scholar, the Nation, and Best American Essays. His next book, Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Emerson in Fifteen Installments, is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Author

Illustration by Kate Lacour

Glossology

Winter 2019 | Essays

Who looks in your mouth? Nobody. That cozy little cavern is designed for darkness and privacy. When the mouth is open, we glimpse occasional bits of action in what is technically called the vestibule, and are struck by the intimacy of what we have seen.