Issue Seven
DECEMBER 2024
Filled to the brim with delights: European news satire, the Chinese Communist Party’s favorite sci-fi series, fiction by Alba de Céspedes and Sergei Lebedev, reviews of novels by Olga Tokarczuk and Rachel Kushner, Yiddish gangster novels, anti-apartheid country music, hard-boiled Bulgarian horsemen and much, much more.
The underbelly of Krochmalna Street
Why aren’t Isaac Bashevis Singer’s gangster novels published in English?
Parallel world
Photos of a Thai village that, due to coastal erosion, is slowly but surely giving way to the sea.
No longer at home
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
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
Pastoralism is the antidote to industrial farming. Kapka Kassabova treks with wild horses in one of Europe’s last wildernesses.
Miracle & yonder
Paul Simon’s Graceland & country music’s global history. «The idea of anti-apartheid country music is counter-intuitive but profound.»
Funny haha
Pretty much every European country has a satirical news site – all in the tradition of American example The Onion.
Something rotten
On the sanatoriums of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
« Tham dii day dii » – Thai farmworkers in Israel
Modern Zionism’s founding ideology, in which diaspora Jews would be redeemed by working the soil, has long ceded to neoliberalism’s imperatives
The business of men
On pregnancy’s bloody histories & its visceral fictions. A review of Trudy Dehue’s brilliant history of pregnancy research, « Egg, Fetus, Baby ».
Neanderthal aesthetics
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, reviewed. «If we discovered a Neanderthal novel, would we be worthy of it?»