The European Review of Books -

Ten Issues in — come celebrate with us! * We give gifts * Tote bags, pins, stickers, bookmarks

It’s our Jubilee, we give tote bags!

Look into the how-s, why-s & where-s in here.

So, kill him [at Aulide]

Karim Kattan

here he is in his bed, so scared he can’t move

Pearls

Welcome to the European Review of Books

What is the European Review of Books? A primer, if you are here for the first time.

FROM THE EDITORS

Ten Issues in — and Europe keeps thinking

the editors

With Issue 10, our golden Jubilee, we celebrate ten editions of independent, multilingual writing that have crossed languages, borders, and expectations. In a time when culture is flattened into opinion and noise, The European Review of Books keeps a space for reflection alive — made by writers, editors, and readers who believe Europe deserves better critique, the […]
Carry The Prophet In Your Coat Pocket

Jonas Hassen Khemiri

When you’re fifteen and you read Kahlil Gibran’s mystical bestseller for the first time.

Essays
Fables of wickedness for a liquid Europe

Gonçalo Tavares

A story about traps

Stories

MORE

The plant whisperers

Kapka Kassabova

If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.

Essays
Glory to the rails

Oksana Forostyna

Millions of Ukrainians left the country during the first weeks of the invasion; four million were evacuated by train, including a million children. Thousands of dogs, cats and other pets, too.

Reviews
Child Kings

Marek Maj

« Time is a child playing draughts; the kingship is a child’s. »

Pearls
Of trotting horses & angelic words

Marisa Libbon

I was reminded of Muybridge’s moving pictures while looking at the serial attempts of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348/49) at rendering the invisible visible.

Pearls
Talk Proto-Indo-European to me, darling

Ed Simon

*wīrós (man), *h₁ék̂wōs (horse), *gwéneh₂ (woman)

Reviews
Texting with … Ece Temelkuran (2)

Sander Pleij

« We are not aware of how defeated we are as intellectuals. »

Pearls
Queen of the night

Alexander Faludy

Maria Theresa, Habsburg empress, created the modern European state. To ponder her reign is to ask what the Enlightenment was — and is. Be careful with your nostalgias.

Reviews
My untranslatable name

Szabolcs László

When my parents went to register my name after I was born, they carried out an especially elaborate plan. They acquired a chocolate bar

Essays
My tongue is Simón Bolívar’s wet dream

Nora Muñiz

My boyfriend had colombianized my Mexican. But my friends had also argentinized it, chileanized it, venezuelized it, ecuadorized it.

Essays
Honorable men sowed this war

Olesya Mamchych

Six poems

Pearls

Blue, this time with a layer of aquamarine. Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear plant, rails that still run through Ukraine’s war, and a Ukrainian great-grandmother turned pro-Russian cosplay icon. Plants in Bulgaria and Western wellness, Bolívar’s tongue stretched across continents. Untranslatable names, Joséphine Baker on Palestine’s seafront, and a liquid Europe.

Discover

Issue Nine

TOP PEARLS

Babushka Z Cosplay

Mattia Salvia

Current Preoccupations, week 40

Fernanda Eberstadt

A Madman’s Tale

Enric Valor

Texting with … Lilia Topouzova

Sander Pleij

Current Preoccupations, week 39

Sander Pleij

TIMELESS FROM THE LIBRARY

Re-generation

Maroussia Mbaye

Photos of young cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, who prove that after decades of depletion, soil recovery is possible.

Essays
Yellow, mellow, smellow

Peter Baldwin

The use of the colon in titling, and other laments.

Essays
Sick men of Europe

Houssine Alloul

King Leopold & Sultan Abdülhamid — a tale of two monarchs. «I’ve come to see them as twins of a kind: monarchs in bourgeois garb.»

Essays
The Three Body Solution

Ties Dams

The Chinese Communist Party embraces the sci-fi hit The Three Body Problem.

Essays
The original Dybbuk

Menachem Kaiser

A story about afterlife. « A saint! What do you mean he’s a saint! the scholar says. He’s a librarian! Are librarians saints? »

Stories
Bad writing advice

the editors

Writing advice is everywhere. Some of it might even be good! But we were interested in the bad.

From The Editors
Europe disenchanted

Gabriel Rom

A broad cast of characters who almost all speak to a solitary woe. This is Europe?

Reviews
Pigeon Water

William Nelson

Online, pigeon water is what we swim in and slather on ourselves.

Essays
Visit the extractocene!

G. Geltner

The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.

Essays

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Issue Nine