December 2024
The underbelly of Krochmalna Street
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Why aren’t Isaac Bashevis Singer’s gangster novels published in English?
TWGGAWI™
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Ripley and the enduring story of the white guy getting away with it. « Even with murder. Especially with murder! »
Parallel world
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Photos of a Thai village that, due to coastal erosion, is slowly but surely giving way to the sea.
Let’s enjoy the moon
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Eight young women live in a college run by nuns in Rome; an excerpt from Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back (Nessuno Torna Indietro).
No longer at home
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A review of Hangman: A Novel by Maya Binyam. «Returning home rests as the thematic cornerstone of African and African-diasporic literature.»
Sick men of Europe
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King Leopold & Sultan Abdülhamid — a tale of two monarchs. «I’ve come to see them as twins of a kind: monarchs in bourgeois garb.»
Of wild men and horses
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Pastoralism is the antidote to industrial farming. Kapka Kassabova treks with wild horses in one of Europe’s last wildernesses.
Miracle & yonder
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Paul Simon’s Graceland & country music’s global history. «The idea of anti-apartheid country music is counter-intuitive but profound.»
Funny haha
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Pretty much every European country has a satirical news site – all in the tradition of American example The Onion.
The body in the crushed roses
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Excerpt from Sergei Lebedev’s new novel The Lady of the Mine (2025), set near a Ukrainian coal mine that buries atrocities from the past.
Something rotten
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On the sanatoriums of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
« Tham dii day dii » – Thai farmworkers in Israel
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Modern Zionism’s founding ideology, in which diaspora Jews would be redeemed by working the soil, has long ceded to neoliberalism’s imperatives