April 2024
Moscow on the Med
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Two winters in Istanbul. If you are a holder of a Russian passport, there are few places in the Western hemisphere that you can go without a visa.
« We are the winners of Eurovision »
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Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times.
The size of longing
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On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment
The coldest, cleanest water in Europe
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Solitary sailing, and the philosophy thereof: What sort of writing is possible when the mind is at sea and so entirely occupied and swaddled?
Ice queens, sex machines
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Insofar as erotica can ever be about something, what is Russia-themed erotica about?
Cannibalinguistics
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Language-learning and people-eating in Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre.
What an animal isn’t
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Two vastly different books — one a picaresque tale, the other a dystopian meditation — both recount a transition from human to animal or from animal to human.
« Everything starts with fire » — Interview with Hélène Cixous
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« The smell was like the sharp notes of a trumpet, a sort of rat-tat-tat like a burst of gunfire, a bombardment. »
From the knacker’s yard
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On the fallen animals loved by Heinrich von Kleist & Curzio Malaparte.