https://www.elsacourt.com/shortfiction daily 0.75 2026-03-23 https://www.elsacourt.com/home daily 1.0 2026-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bb0c762c46f6d5eaeda974f/43f4f01d-35ee-4725-a767-4b709a779aec/Edit-15.jpg Home Elsa Court is a writer and translator based in London. Her short stories have appeared in New Letters, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, The Tangerine, and Worms, and were most recently shortlisted in the Bridport Prize and the London Magazine Short Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Fence Reader’s Choice Award in the short fiction category. Court’s essays and reviews on contemporary literature have featured in Granta, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. Between 2018 and 2020, she wrote a monthly online column on language, citizenship, and identity for The Financial Times, chronicling her acquisition of British citizenship post-referendum. She is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London and fiction editor for Review 31. She is represented by Kat Aitken at Lexington Literary. https://www.elsacourt.com/contact daily 0.75 2025-03-06 https://www.elsacourt.com/nonfiction daily 0.75 2026-03-31 https://www.elsacourt.com/academic daily 0.75 2026-03-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bb0c762c46f6d5eaeda974f/fd73c6cc-4617-4505-8749-38128ea5e76d/978-3-030-36733-6.webp Academic Publications - The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography 1955-85 The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 (Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture Series, 2020) traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumption that has become synonymous with contemporary America. “The American Roadside takes the titanic leviathan of the American highway and, through careful unfurling of its ostensibly homogeneous network of routes, turnpikes, and rest stops, lays bare one of the most provocative and indeed recognizable American spaces.” — Will Carroll, The Journal of American Studies, October 2021 “Written with brio – especially when the book veers off the highway of academic writing – The American Roadside offers new perspectives on well-known works.” — Douglas Field, The Times Literary Supplement, January 2021 “Engaging and illuminating study. … Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. … The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.” —Neil Archer, Review 31, May, 2020