Erin Langner

Sep 19, 2024 | theoffingmag.com | Jessica Poon |Erin Langner |Kim Tongin |Jessalyn Maguire

I was not attractive in high school. I’m not complaining. Being homely is an underrated form of birth control. It isn’t necessarily salubrious for a teenage girl’s self-esteem, but self-esteem is a lie invented to sell shampoo. I fancied myself a photographer as a teenager, but I had ulterior motives. All this to say, I knew that the boys I liked in high school would not reciprocate my feelings, unless they were lobotomized and had uncorrected vision problems. I didn’t need to date them.

May 13, 2024 | therumpus.net | Erin Langner

Cancel culture is usually linked to the end of something: an event, a relationship, a career. And yet, Christine Ma-Kellams’s debut novel The Band (Atria Books, 2024) begins with the cancellation of K-pop star Sang Duri, in the wake of his downfall. On its surface, the writer’s slim debut novel chronicles Duri’s attempt to escape the public eye by approaching a woman in an H Mart and offering to cook tteokbokki in her home, a McMansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Nov 17, 2023 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Erin Langner

The Chicago of High Fidelity (2000) is the one I wanted to live in back when I was young and stuck in the suburbs. In my mind, I could follow its graffiti-lined, wheat-pasted streets, to get beyond the cul-de-sacs of tidy family homes that felt so clean and so stifling to me back then. I still see that Chicago as the El rumbles behind thirtysomething Rob Gordon (John Cusack), who walks in his Gen-X uniform (long leather jacket, Adidas sneakers) to Championship Vinyl, the record store he owns.