Matt Margini is a freelance writer and the videogames section editor for Public Books. He completed a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2018, and his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He currently teaches English at the Ransom Everglades School in Miami, FL.
Matt Margini
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Writing on Public Books
The Book That Made Me: An Animal
The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester …
What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences …
How to Write about Videogames
I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” indicating that it was marginally better than the regular version, and exponentially harder to get. I remember the winding wooded streets of […]
Canine Control
Kornél Mundruczó’s White God has one of those premises that feels unique but also strangely inevitable: a mixed-breed dog named Hagen, abused by everyone except the 13-year-old girl who loved him, decides he’s had enough and leads a bloody revolution against humankind. We glimpse, in the opening scene, his canine army swarming the streets of Budapest—a […]
Fly on the Wall
What is it like to be a fly? What is it like to be a Jew? Despite its trans-species premise—an 18th-century French Jew is reincarnated as a fly in 21st-century Long Island—Jacob’s Folly, the new novel from author and filmmaker Rebecca Miller, is far more interested in answering the latter question than the former. Yes, […]
