Skinned alive
Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
A sangre fría
Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.
The room I am in
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
Of human children & language children
The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
Reviews
Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions
Reviewed by Ed Simon
The Last White Man
Reviewed by Sander Pleij
Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History
Reviewed by Gabriel Rom
Жидівський король
Reviewed by Svetlana Lavochkina
Aqui no es Miami
Reviewed by Caroline Tracey
Lady Susan
Reviewed by Wiegertje Postma
Latest
Curtain call
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
When the world makes rags of us
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
Flags & bones
On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
The Archipelago Conversations, an excerpt
— Interview with Édouard Glissant
An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »
A recipe for word vomit
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.
Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.
← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
求索 & 层云
→ → 求索 / 你引导我来未来
← ← 来未来我导引你 / 索求
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
Top pearls
1
Marx and the art of natural winemaking
The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
2
Back to the office
From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?
3
A can-can dancer performs a Christmas tree
〖 A killed darling 〗 Being alone in a new city over the holidays was wonderful and, as it happened, not to be repeated.
4
The South Bronx did not exist
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Spoiler alert: it did.
5
Longing + debt
〖 A killed darling 〗 And — I failed. I replaced this paragraph.
A Silence Shared
« If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »
A recipe for word vomit
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
Flags & bones
On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
Skinned alive
Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
Kill your darlings
Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden
A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
An Unlucky Man
« He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. »
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.