Welcome to the European Review of Books
What is the European Review of Books? A primer, if you are here for the first time.
Europe disenchanted
A broad cast of characters who almost all speak to a solitary woe. This is Europe? Ben Judah depicts a continent of islands, hollowed of associational life.
Corrupted, yet intact
On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Europe of European integration. An excerpt from The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-history of Today’s European Union, 1937–1951.
On learning to write again
Ramallah, downtown, fifth floor. The phone rings and the caller’s number appears on the screen. It’s an unknown number. And yet a call that comes at this hour must be answered.
تعلُّم الكتابة من جديد
رام الله، وسط البلد، الطابق الخامس. يرن الهاتف ويظهر رقم المتّصل على الشاشة. إنه ليس لأحد معارفنا، فالرقم غير معروف. مع ذلك، يتطلّبُ اتصال هاتفي في ساعة مبكِّرةٍ كهذه الردَّ عليه.
Two palindromes
→ Setting of the Sun at West Mountain / Puffing & panting ←
→ Worm-eaten Rimbaud / Always knowing whom ←
日落西山 & 蟲蠹的蘭波
→ 日落西山 / 國是前胸 ← → 蟲蠹的蘭波 / 始終知誰 ←
Reviews
The Governance of China, Volume I
Reviewed by Stephan Petermann
Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe
Reviewed by Christy Wampole
Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy
Reviewed by Marisa Libbon
This is Europe: The Way We Live Now
Reviewed by Gabriel Rom
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (Part One)
Reviewed by George Blaustein
Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity
Reviewed by Ingo Venzke
More
Art before art
On Paleolithic painters & speculative criticism.
Forget your darlings
On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.
Hitchhiker
A story about danger. « She wondered when he was going to ask her where she was going. »
Otostopçu
« Eylül adamın ‘ne tarafa gidiyorsun’ diye sormasını bekledi »
Streuselkuchen
Eine Geschichte über Coolness. « Das Telefon klingelt. Jim Jarmusch ist dran und fragt, ob ich nicht bei ihm vorbeikommen will. »
Streuselkuchen
A story about coolness. « The phone rings. It is Jim Jarmusch, and he asks if I want to come over to his place. »
Five uneasy pieces
How I stopped being an older brother (& other stories)
Bad writing advice
Writing advice is everywhere. Some of it might even be good! But we were interested in the bad.
Pigeon Water
Online, pigeon water is what we swim in and slather on ourselves.
The inborn germ
Why death? Who or what dies? Philosophers tend not to explain, but to justify. When do such questions become biological questions? Does it help?
The invention of austerity
Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?
Schwarzeneggerology
On Arnold, action cinema & Übermenschlichkeit. « Arnold Schwarzenegger was action cinema’s Adamic man, alternately entering and exiting normal human time. »
Top pearls
1
Five uneasy pieces
How I stopped being an older brother (& other stories)
2
The Mass of Mies
« Less is more »? The scale and shape of his body gave the architect Mies van der Rohe an unequaled weight and architectural authority.
3
Unclaimed, claimed, unclaimable
On unrecognized states, micronations and curious border zones.
4
On paths not taken
« Genocide Studies » is a house with many rooms. It accommodates and even encourages a broadening of its central concept. And like all academic fields, it presumes its object of study will always be there.
5
Every end has a start
In 2005, Yamandú Roos embarked on the photographic project Europeans: one continent, forty countries, 65.000 kilometers.
The case of the missing elephant
On animal charisma and animal vengeance. What happens when an elephant goes missing a year after her death.
The art of losing
On artificial intelligence, murderous elephants & Elizabeth Bishop
No man’s land
On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?
The pulverization of memory
Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
Perhentian Sunrise
A story about romance. « The eve of a suitor’s arrival, bigger than Christmas or birthday, I tell you. »
Doom is in the details
Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.
Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag
On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »
The cemetery-goer
On the travels of Karl-Markus Gauß, and the unlikely guardians of the dream of Europe.
« My ghost, we do no batshit »
On the untranslatability of Ukrainian jokes