https://www.ariellezibrak.com/about daily 1.0 2026-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/8302dcf9-2960-4066-adc7-812f2a97b167/C4ECB0D7-E0C3-4625-8A58-472ADD41277F_1_105_c.jpg About - Arielle Zibrak is the author of two books, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024); as well as the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women, a more inclusive update to their Four Stories volume, from Penguin Classics in 2025. Her streaming series,“A Literary Tour of the United States,” was released July 2025 by the Great Courses Plus platform. She lives in Laramie, where she is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Representation: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency https://www.ariellezibrak.com/invite daily 0.75 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/a66656cc-8ea5-43cf-bfd8-020e7195948c/barber+stereograph.jpg Invite https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/4179e3d1-44e9-4d9c-b9a2-ad86e3868f06/colliseum.jpg Invite https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/9d5ea6e3-25fc-45c3-83ae-a86e1bb06f45/stereograph+dive.jpg Invite https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work daily 0.75 2026-02-11 https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/essay-at-the-missouri-review monthly 0.5 2025-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/66c70fb9-bda0-4f27-a90e-988af75ee9d1/1968_1_p_4-686x1024.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/75d493c0-6c10-4822-abae-9a47a37aab0b/best.jpg https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/twelve-stories-by-american-women monthly 0.5 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1725324685479-M3NGF7TT5RCNIHBUZU6M/C212C22A-0C9F-46E2-BA8E-47112305F24D_1_105_c.jpeg https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/essay-for-the-millions monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/9abf95a0-9a67-4b34-a74a-3351990c282f/Screen+Shot+2023-03-07+at+10.37.14+AM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/thenewyorker monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/46451be0-7d81-43f6-871a-433570016551/Screen+Shot+2023-07-13+at+10.59.09+AM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/writing-for-mcsweeneys monthly 0.5 2023-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1634581082868-TB694C7NPPNET8SAXH8J/Screen+Shot+2021-10-18+at+11.52.50+AM.png Work - Humor at McSweeney's - THE UNIVERSITY WILL BE ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT ITS NEW BUDGET PLAN ONLY WITH DIRECT QUOTATIONS FROM GERTRUDE STEIN’S TENDER BUTTONS Q: Has student feedback been sought on these cuts? A: There was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made. This shows the disorder, it does, it shows more likeness than anything else, it shows the single mind that directs an apple. All the coats have a different shape, that does not mean that they differ in color, it means a union between use and exercise and a horse. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612310235812-BQYO472KLVIT3ATIHHKA/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.56.58+PM.png Work - Humor at McSweeney's - REASONS YOU MIGHT DIE OF CONSUMPTION IN A 19TH-CENTURY NOVEL, IN ORDER FROM LEAST LIKELY TO MOST LIKELY You fell in love with someone who is richer than you are. You got lost in the moors in the rain. You work in a mill. You are a prostitute. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612310032148-ONCOHJ11ZHGHRCHLACDS/best-classic-novels-620x360.jpg Work - Humor at McSweeney's - SUPER SHORT CLIFFSNOTES FOR ALL CLASSIC NOVELS A. Protagonist dies of alienation. B. Protagonist succumbs to the prison of society. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/a-literary-tour-of-the-united-states monthly 0.5 2026-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/bc860800-6d89-4720-95bc-69ea37ff606b/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+12.34.15%E2%80%AFPM.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/105cf51a-509a-45f4-b64c-b8579e934d85/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+12.01.25%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/7d46c355-4c04-499a-b197-f4490d09651f/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+1.03.39%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/931195d2-7939-4a23-b670-935b3bce7929/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+1.03.50%E2%80%AFPM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/larb-a2m5m monthly 0.5 2021-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302680219-NYEFFU927P40I6OTL0LG/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.47.01+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - The End in the Middle of Nowhere: Report from Wyoming It’s been a long day, and I end it as I have the last several, in the worst of all possible ways — scrolling news stories and scientific research articles, poring over modeling studies and trying to teach myself statistics. A research paper published in the Journal of Autoimmunology last month (which has already been cited thirteen times since then) suggests that the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 is the wet animal market in Wuhan City, China. I text John: “This is how the animals get us in the end. Everything else was just warnings. How are you guys?” No answer. I realize it’s almost 1am where he is. I should go to sleep myself. But I can’t stop seeing the shape of a pattern, in these floating images of a molecule that looks like a planet itself. I marvel anew at how the universe endlessly repeats at different scales, the perfect symmetry of actions and reactions: gravitational pulls, tides, imperceptible waves of movement, contractions of muscles — systole and diastole. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303025768-EA0QN6XPN7WQY31A2FML/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.56.36+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - Malia’s Tears . . .Malia’s was a hard cry to watch — for me and I am sure for many — because it was a cry that we know intimately: the public-private kind of breakdown that one usually has for the first time in the late teens or early 20s (Malia is 18.) The kind of cry you might have on a bus, listening to music, looking out the window and letting your mind wander, only to realize, after the tears have already come, that you are not invisible to your fellow passengers. It was a cry caught between the loneliness of the window and the humiliation of the aisle. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302796447-JB1UNURV65J5JSLW4YJ3/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.53.05+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - Seeing Both Sides of the Shield: On Rebecca Harding Davis Whether she should turn out to be the hero of her own life — the Dickensian question that animated so much of late 19th-century literature and thought — was immaterial to Davis. If Emerson is right and “there is properly no history; only biography,” the story of a life that places others at its center might be the biography we need most. Harris channels Davis’s ability to offer us a history that engages the ideas we’ve come to embrace alongside those we’ve come to distance ourselves from, our heroes in conversation with our villains. Davis wrote that “[t]he man who sees both sides of the shield may be right, but he is most uncomfortable”; that discomfort seems a small price to pay for a step in the direction of truth. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/guiltypleasures-g8gx9 monthly 0.5 2025-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303229361-2JHCUNXFZ64Q87QCVXSO/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+3.00.15+PM.png Work - Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures - Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures A PopMatters Top-Twenty Book of 2021 What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies. In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves. Praise: “Funny, smart, engrossing. I fell head over heels for this exploration of guilty pleasures. Zibrak writes with both an academic's acute eye for pattern and depth and the intimacy of the very works she explores. I feel like I've been laughing with my best friend in a closet, and I can't wait to give a copy to every single one of my friends. I urge you to read it and give it to your friends, too.” --Barbara O'Neal, bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids “Reading Arielle Zibrak’s witty and charming survey of what she calls “femme fiction” offers all pleasure and no guilt. Diving into the complex topic of “guilty pleasures,” she mines low and popular culture for nuggets of wisdom about gender, race, class, fiction and fantasy. You will love this book if you need the encouragement to indulge guilty pleasures. You will love it even more if you make no apologies for those pleasures. Enjoy!” —Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism and The Queer Art of Failure https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/aoi-6ytej monthly 0.5 2021-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303418808-VM2OW26QUJVNPZDB3EE1/Image+2-2-21+at+9.58+AM.jpeg Work - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays Following the publication of The Age of Innocence in 1920, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. To mark 100 years since the book's first publication, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays brings together leading scholars to explore cutting-edge critical approaches to Wharton's most popular novel. Re-visiting the text through a wide range of contemporary critical perspectives, this book considers theories of mind and affect, digital humanities and media studies; narrational form; innocence and scandal; and the experience of reading the novel in the late twentieth century as the child of refugees. With an introduction by editor Arielle Zibrak that connects the 1920 novel to the sociocultural climate of 2020, this collection both celebrates and offers stimulating critical insights into this landmark novel of modern American literature. Reviews “Classic literary works maintain their status by speaking to subsequent generations anew. Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) has been highly regarded since it was first published, appreciated by both scholars and general readers throughout the past century and into the 21st. Few readers of 20th-century novels can resist the sumptuous New York of 1870 that Wharton brings to life or tire of the love triangle between the main characters: Newland Archer, May Welland, and Ellen Olenska. The essays Zibrak brings together offer varied perspectives on this classic tale, some pointing toward criticism to come. Some contributors approach the book in traditional ways. For example, Carol Singley provides a cogent reading of the main characters in the context of American individualism, and Hildegard Hoeller compares the novel to Wharton's bolder collection of novellas, Old New York (1924). Other essayists employ verb-mapping data and analyze Wharton's 'free indirect discourse.' A consideration of an early film adaptation of Wharton's famous novel and a personal essay round out the collection. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —CHOICE “Individualism, ambivalence, scandal, and belonging--all of these are associated with Wharton's The Age of Innocence, in this stunning new collection of essays. Zibrak orchestrates a whole new set of innovative readings of the novel--and the 1934 film based on it. These essays treat its modernist affect and narrative style, along with its status as an international novel with France as its focus. In moving from a new digital study of Wharton's verbs to the historical status of psychology before 1920, to the novel's relation to Wharton's "Old New York" novellas and her various plots for Age, this collection soars. It heralds a new energy that will advance Wharton Studies anew.” – Dale M. Bauer, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Bringing significant insights to the novel's characterization, narration, modernist and international contexts, gender politics, and 1934 film adaptation, this collection employs digital humanities, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary methodologies in exciting new ways and reintroduces us to the beauty and complexity of The Age of Innocence. These stimulating essays remind us of the enduring importance of Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning work in a new age and inspire further avenues of scholarship.” – Gary Totten, Professor and Chair of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/avidly-a5326 monthly 0.5 2021-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1620664456303-YIJ5FJ9GF88VURQ268OX/Screen+Shot+2021-05-10+at+10.33.42+AM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Pleasure-y Guilts: The True Meaning of Christmas Movies These bad Christmas movies have always offered a special pleasure for me because I am also a career-minded woman who hasn’t learned the true meaning of Christmas. So I find Holly or Carol or Eve “relatable,” except for the key point that Santa will probably never send me a boyfriend for Christmas because I’m Jewish. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301097129-SGJNBR0OXCTU7FUKUNLV/practice-pyramid.png Work - Essays for Avidly - On the Mat We’re Briefly Perfect: On Netflix’s “Cheer” There is a moment after a cheer team floats into their pyramid when they hang still in mid-air, creating the impression that time has stopped. Then the pyramid disassembles in much the same way it was built; the tape could be running forwards or back. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301506533-E8AM5O2Q821PHM5SMEYS/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.31.32+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Dancing at Lizzo’s Wedding I recently, unexpectedly, almost died. And then after that, I had to sit around in some of the worst pain I’ve known, thinking, as one does. A lot of what I was thinking about was the video for the Lizzo song “Truth Hurts,” which I’d been watching over and over prior to the almost-death incident. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301757135-F6JH7WU1GSUA25GZSOFZ/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.35.26+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Sexy Beasts The ubiquitous trope of hidden identity within the context of romantic encounters is a G-rated rape fantasy wherein what matters is the passion of the pursuer and what is erased is the subjectivity of the pursued. (You can’t consent to an encounter when you’ve been misled about who you’re encountering.) Even when the gender roles are reversed, the position on consent remains the same. It’s easier, when you’re a teenager especially, to exercise sexual desire when the recipient remains anonymous, hence the teenage sexual obsession with unknowable celebrities. There are fewer feelings to deal with when all of the feelings are yours. But when we transpose these benign tendencies into actual sexual encounters, the results are disturbing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301961711-ZUKDXYGYTF72TDKV9AWB/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.39.09+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - On Amish Time Awhile ago, having just moved to Ohio from the east coast, I decided to spend New Year’s Eve with the Amish. Well, not really with the Amish but in the place where the Amish live: Amish country, the second largest tourist attraction in Ohio according to the brochures (1). The Amish don’t celebrate the new year however, nor do they celebrate Christmas on December twenty fifth. They celebrate “Old Christmas,” which is later, in January, and this seems to characterize a lot of what the Amish do: it’s not what the English do. (“English” is the adjective for the non-Amish. “Englisher” is the noun.) They’re on a different schedule. It’s hard not to romanticize the Amish. Their food is delicious. They wear charming outfits (The bonnets! The beards! The wide-placket shirts!) and they ride around in black, horse-drawn buggies with big wagon wheels that harken back to a simpler time. That’s another thing the tourism brochures say again and again and it’s sort of true. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/baffler4d8cr monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302127444-OUKS22V5RB40EO9F4EH5/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.41.56+PM.png Work - Essays for The Baffler - Big-League Bluster (co-authored with Marissa Gemma) THERE’S AN OLD JOKE about Soviet Russia that you might have heard, where you reverse the two parts of a sentence: “In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you.” The joke is an example of chiasmus, a rhetorical form that repeats words or clauses in transposed order—but this particular version has a name: the “Russian Reversal.” In the United States, the Russian Reversal flourished during the Cold War. Bob Hope, for example, told a form of it at the 1958 Oscars, reminding his audience that though there was a television in his Moscow hotel room, “it watches you.” The comedian Yakov Smirnoff popularized it in the 1980s, hawking Miller Lite with the slogan “In Russia, Party always finds you.” It’s easy to see how the Russian Reversal and Cold War–era Soviet politics relate: the joke turns a subject into an object—something, or, more tellingly, someone, who does not act but is acted upon. The individual becomes subordinate to the agency of some abstract force—the law, say, or the media, or the social order. The politics of democracy versus communism, neatly distilled into rhetorical form. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302292865-TT72PLZMPXLG3I1W1I1A/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.44.37+PM.png Work - Essays for The Baffler - The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane Much has been written and filmed on the allure and narratives of the American road, but far less on American air travel. Perhaps this is because the road represents the America we’d like to think we inhabit: patriotic, free, individualistic, and largely democratic; whereas the reality of contemporary air travel may be closer to the America in which we actually live: global, uncomfortably communal, highly regulated, and intensely class-stratified. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/toast-3t2nt monthly 0.5 2026-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612308983007-PSY3T1UUBO4L4AZJA65Z/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.36.09+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - How To Tell If You Are In A Henry James Novel You have a burning longing for someone that, if acted upon, would violate every ideal upon which you’ve meticulously built your fraught existence. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612309385005-QDS1OQDKN09PN3JTS8PS/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.42.37+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - “A Second Life”: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Pleasures of Misogyny Then the absolute worst thing ever to have happened in fiction happens. Practically-dead-already Esther has to live with and care for the horse-ape who raped her because he’s still her husband. And John & co. just go on and on about how great of her this is. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612309193702-RP093FFMDMBFBS9ZE67T/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.39.42+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - Edith Wharton Reviews the Starbucks Located at Her Childhood Home on West 23rd Street Mr. Schultz’s grasping initiation into the New York scene was a large, garish shop in the wasteland beyond Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-Seventh Street and Broadway in 1994. Since that time, his shops have increasingly begun to migrate downtown, encroaching on “the reservation” where the last good families have already been entirely bought out by University tycoons. It was, perhaps, merely a matter of time before one of these co-engines driving the new New York colonized the modest sandstone townhome on Twenty-Third Street where my parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, established themselves and produced three children: Frederic, Henry, and Pussy. (Such was my somewhat unfortunate nickname.) https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/recentscholarship monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/writing-against-reform-aesthetic-realism-in-the-progressive-era monthly 0.5 2025-12-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/b7994a90-ca86-4a73-b5e0-bc18ef98ec7f/Zibrak_cover_final.jpg Work - Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era - Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper," and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow. Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America's leading writers. SELECTED PRAISE: “Zibrak has written a book that does and is what it sets out to prove, an artfully written book whose implications go well beyond its focus on literature. It too is a call to action to academic writers to not just write insular criticism but scholarship that is engaging, affecting, and purposeful.” Mark Noonan, Modern Fiction Studies “Writing against Reform will swiftly become required reading for scholars of American realism and of US literary studies more broadly. The book also offers exciting avenues of inquiry for students and scholars beyond these fields in the way it models a critical orientation to literature that goes beyond easy binary oppositions that see art as either “liberatory or oppressive” or “reflective of progressive or conservative ideologies” (20). Through her insightful and sustained close readings and careful attentiveness to the politics of history, Zibrak models how to make literature itself a resource for thinking.” Laura Fisher, The Edith Wharton Review “Nearly always incorporating an analysis of visual art alongside her appraisals of different literary realisms, Zibrak profoundly contributes to the field by compelling us to reevaluate our understanding of politics in turn-of-the-century fiction . . . the book teems with revelatory readings that should inform how we teach and study the authors it covers going forward.” John Funchion, The Henry James Review “Writing against Reform is an engagingly written and persuasively argued piece of scholarship that is a pleasure to read. This is the work of a scholar widely and comfortably knowledgeable in her field of study, and a model of how scholarship should be done: deeply researched, coherently reasoned, and always eloquent.” María Carla Sánchez, author of Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America “An engrossing and compelling study, Writing against Reform uses an impressive range of references and thorough understanding of publishing and social contexts to offer a convincing argument that is as satisfying as it is provocative.” Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life '“Zibrak's ‘aesthetic realists’ opposed the co-optation of art forms by the new social sciences and disengagement from historical-cultural formalist traditions that gave art meaning beyond its own era. Their thoughtful considerations of social issues were subtler, with a view to broader historical circumstances rather than just specific contemporary events or legislation. A probing and convincing evaluation. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended.” A. E. Krulikowski, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries