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.
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The underbelly of Krochmalna Street
Why aren’t Isaac Bashevis Singer’s gangster novels published in English?
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Parallel world
Photos of a Thai village that, due to coastal erosion, is slowly but surely giving way to the sea.
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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.»
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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.»
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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.
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Miracle & yonder
Paul Simon’s Graceland & country music’s global history. «The idea of anti-apartheid country music is counter-intuitive but profound.»
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Funny haha
Pretty much every European country has a satirical news site – all in the tradition of American example The Onion.
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Something rotten
On the sanatoriums of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
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« 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
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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 ».
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Neanderthal aesthetics
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, reviewed. «If we discovered a Neanderthal novel, would we be worthy of it?»