Skip to content
Issue Twelve
SEPTEMBER 2026
A pale, dusty peach – warmer than pink, softer than orange, like the last stretch of summer light. Meet Issue Twelve, out in September 2026. In this issue: the self-flagellation that is writing a human text, a visit to an Irish subsea cable landing station, winter as a disappearing cultural construct, and fascism’s libidinal thrill. Sex workers as markers of national character, and the translators of the Yugoslavia Tribunal as an invisible force. Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski saw it all coming, war photographer Lee Miller gets close to the edge. The ethics of paying attention, and the philosophy of designing books. Plus, a newly translated story by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) on a deadly family, and a quartet of essays touching on the question: how dead is international law?
-
Crafting a human text is like wrestling a wild animal
On Cécile Wajsbrot’s « Nevermore », Eva Meijer’s « Een woord voor », and the constant self-flagellation that comes with putting words to paper.
-
To what extent are we part of Mark Zuckerberg?
I started reading « The future is for everyone; the path to a positive AI future », an essay by Mark Zuckerberg, the intellectual equal of…
-
Cultural observation
A friend of mine from Brussels visited me in Rīga last week. She had never been to this part of Europe before, so there was…
-
Museum for one
I have learned what artistic freedom is. It happened in a secret museum somewhere in Sweden. I had to wade through tall grass toward a…
-
Would you rather eat your friend or your enemy?
This summer, when it’s been too hot to contemplate cooking any kind of meat, let alone human, Le Monde has been publishing a wonderful seven-part series on…
-
When the beans won’t cook
I’m futzing around the kitchen, heat-wave grumpy. I’m cooking white beans with tomatoes for dinner; I soaked the dried beans overnight, but they are a…
-
A forest
The weather has been chaotic enough in the Baltics to produce perfect conditions for forests to offer their annual gifts: berries, mushrooms, all sorts of…
-
Mothers who don’t feel so motherly
Last week, I wrote about Nebraska, a novel in which a mother pushes her handicapped child in front of a train. This week I’m reviewing an only…
-
Odysseus and the global wars veterans
Somewhere near Chasiv Yar, along the « fortress belt » in the Donetsk region, Serhii Krynitskyi, a Ukrainian soldier, crawls out of the dugout that he has…
-
Mrs. Chatterjee’s children
The novel’s grisly premise hits you on the opening pages: Anna Chatterjee’s husband and two surviving children are journeying to the upstate New York prison…
-
The cartography of everything wrong
So there I am, in a museum in a town that in 150 years has evolved from a community of farmers to an artists’ colony,…
-
Meadows are the best
My best friend in Brussels told me he never used the word meadow before he met me. And one of my fellow editors believes the ultimate form…
-
The persistence of William Morris
The idea for a workshop on « the university of Nowhere », where researchers and staff would conceive and describe a utopian university, came about after some…
-
The many different faces of the shortest night
This week, Latvians went into the wild. The longest day of the year fell on a weekend (21 June), and Līgo nakts / Jāņi —…
-
Carlo Ginzburg: They are the Dogs of God
I needed to know more about werewolves. Carlo Ginzburg, I realized, was my man. Ginzburg is an Italian historian who practises what’s described as « microhistory…
-
Orford Ness
We stepped off the ferry — an open motorboat, with room for twelve passengers — onto the dock. We’d come for a day’s outing to…
-
The Footnotes
The ERB is reading the 2026 World Cup and offering daily dispatches, in collaboration with Hazar Deniz Eker and Sander Pleij (one is losing his…
-
The Berlin Review’s review
The printed editions of Berlin Review, Zeitschrift für Bücher und Ideen, are a feast (three times a year in print, eight online). About half the articles are…
-
On Marjane Satrapi
Some people remember 2000 as the year our computers DIDN’T all explode. I remember it as the year Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis appeared. Persepolis was a comic-book autobiographical novel,…
-
El Camino always provides
Day 1 Two coffees in and the day has just begun. I’m on a plane to Portugal and everybody is basically dressed like me: the…
-
Potpourri # 11This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
-
Books | Interview Elina Alter
RUSSIA IN EXILE — A Q&A with the translator and editor, who recommends Russian writers-in-exile to read.
-
Book | Les Lumières sombres
FRANCE — Arnaud Miranda’s Les Lumières sombres is a book about the most radical challenge to liberal democracy since Communism.
-
Book & film | Housing!
SPAIN — Home and homelessness are at the center of Spanish public anxiety. This has created a new branch of literature — for the moment,…
-
Books | Butchers!
THE LONDON BOOK FAIR — A new trend I noticed at the London Book Fair: young European novelists writing about butchers and the meat industry.
-
Documentary | 2m²
TURKEY/BELGIUM — If a Turkish migrant dies in Belgium, where and how should their loved ones visit them?
-
Series | Portobello
ITALY — The six-episode television series Portobello is the latest work by the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio.
-
Processing evil
The Nuremberg trials saw the birth of simultaneous interpretation. Hermann Göring especially manipulated this new system of translation for his own purposes. « Where Eichmann…
-
A kiss like a fish in the mouth
My schoolgirl passion for Julio Cortázar brings me to a Montparnasse grave with one husband and two wives.
-
The dog who bit everyone
Fifty-one years after his death, Pasolini’s vision of capitalism is even more urgent. A new play examines his unfinished masterpiece.
-
Book | The Ice Prophet
THE NETHERLANDS — While reading this new book about « Iceman » Wim Hof, one scene lodged itself most prominently in my mind: the one in which…
-
Book | White Moss
THE ARCTIC CIRCLE — An interview with Irina Sadovina, who recently translated a novel set in a nomadic Indigenous Nenets community in Northern Siberia, by…
-
Book | La fine del mondo
ITALY — An eighty-year-old communist running errands in a tracksuit in an upper-middle-class neighborhood — Francesco Pecoraro’s fictional avatar is a thoughtful, sad, sweet, engaged,…
-
Collective punishment
When pirates captured two British merchant ships, the Genoese of England were put on trial.
-
Psychopaths and AI never know when to shut upThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
What Patrick Bateman, ChatGPT and Sara Machina have in common.
-
What do Europeans dream about?
A new book by Wolfram Lotz could have the key to a shared European unconscious. « Now I will show you what it’s like to live…
-
The cudgellers’ dilemma
What Goya’s Black Paintings can tell us about current Spanish climate struggles.
-
Magazine | Granta 174: Therapy
ENGLAND — The Freud Museum. A loud merry gang of writers and friends crowded the rooms of the large London house where Dr. Freud settled…
-
Looted Lauterbach
The most sublime of the violins made by Antonio Stradivarius (Cremona, c. 1644-1737) have names like roses: there is the « Countess Polignac » and…
-
It’s all about poetic swimmers
« I am a philosopher, and philosophers do not often like to use big words. »
-
Interview with Hazar Deniz Eker
After a particularly active Current Preoccupation from mid-April 2026 — featuring a walk to the Belgian-French border and Issue Eleven contributor Hazar Deniz Eker —…
-
Walking into France like there’s no tomorrow
How many beach borders have you seen in your life? This weekend, I found myself returning to a long-term project that started, as many things…
-
Feeling political together
A four-hour journey into populist algorithms, and a soup that never got made.
-
On the Hungarian elections
« Last night didn’t just feel like an election victory, there was something of 1989 about it, the way people were dancing on the roofs…
-
The vanished world
Monsieur and Madame Louis Cahen d’Anvers never liked Renoir’s portrait of their eight-year-old daughter; it was Madame Cahen d’Anvers’s lover who chose Renoir over a…
-
Epic Failure
Growing up on, and still happily consuming, American popular culture, my brain’s first association when it sees the letters e, p, i and c, is to read epic failure. And…
-
Underground rave, literary
We are all explorers. Last week was Easter weekend. I’m not much of a Christian, but where I’m from (Latviaaaa!) it means family gatherings, eggs…
-
« Exile is a form of action »
The Bibliothèque Tourguenieff, the oldest Russian-language lending-library outside Russia, is on the second floor of an anonymous apartment building in the 5th arrondissement of Paris.…
-
The West’s West and the rest’s West
« To see the West as a process means that France was at one time westernized. Rome was westernized. Greece was westernized »
-
Saving the angel
« This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees…
-
On being plagiarized
« To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »
-
What Sweden is, not
« Once the most social democratic country in Europe, and then, in the 1990s, the most neoliberal one, Sweden now aims to become the most nationalist…
-
The Passion of strangers: a philosophy of friendship
Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented.
-
« Friendship is revolutionary » — Interview with Marina Garcés
« I think reimagining relationships of distance and proximity is interesting in order to go beyond romantic ideas of neighbors. »
-
Looted libraries
« In both countries, it has left the government officials grappling with an extremely delicate and complex issue. Why is it so difficult to move forward? »
-
A woman in Tangiers: against erasure
« I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse. »
-
The political life of dreams
« Dreams could show an internalization of oppression just as easily as a resistance to oppression — which would mean a dream isn’t so free…
-
A letter from
« Even if you feel at home in time and space today, you know that you are already in mourning for the future loss of everything…
-
Can AI have a headache?
« This summer my inner warrior was kissed back alive by an unlikely figure: the Pope. »
-
The sea between
« In order to survive amidst this bleak existence, the Mediterranean people established two distinct strategies: hopelessness or salvation. Some embraced hopelessness as the best way…
-
~ Potpourri: Amsterdam
A place where everything that cannot be endured aboveground finds its refuge.
-
~ Potpourri: Paris
Copi channels his fascination with lowlives, queer people, immigrants and other outcasts
-
~ Potpourri: Florence
Langer, the Europeanist, the practical pacifist, the man who inaugurated Italian environmentalism and inspired European environmentalism.
-
~ Potpourri: Spain
It’s one of those non-fiction chronicles in which the topic doesn’t really matter.
-
~ Potpourri: France
« Chaos is no longer the weapon of the rebels but the banner of those in power. »
-
~ Potpourri: Malta
He tried to live as if none of it had ever happened, but some stories don’t let you go.
-
Ten Issues in — and Europe keeps thinking
With Issue Ten, our golden Jubilee, we celebrate ten editions of independent, multilingual writing that crosses languages, borders and expectations. At a time when culture…
-
The Emperor’s New Clothes Part II: Crowds and Phones
Last week, I found myself waiting in a long line of twenty-something-year-olds in fancy dress, Goths in black leather and chains, trans waifs in white…
-
« The Emperor’s Clothes »
Any fool can see that the head of state is naked, that he is a complete phony — except for himself. Such appears to be…
-
Texting with … Lilia Topouzova
I wanted to show that history and memory are inseparable—and that unsilencing is itself a method.
-
« Mother Has Arrived »
Last Saturday I saw a play called « Mother Has Arrived ». It was written and directed by Than Hussein Clark, an American artist based…
-
D’win Erbyn, Genocide
The elderly gentleman seemed at first sight to be having some kind of seizure. He was lying on the ground, his body shaking convulsively. Young…
-
Letter to the editor
Issue Nine features the essay After Midnight, by Alexander Etkind and Johanna Gautier-Morin. Here’s a reaction to that essay, by Frances Butler, who has recently…
-
Babushka Z CosplayThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
A Ukrainian great-grandmother inadvertently becomes a pro-Russian icon.
-
The plant whisperers
If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.
-
Carry The Prophet in your coat pocketThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
When you’re fifteen and you read Kahlil Gibran’s mystical bestseller for the first time.
-
Glory to the railsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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…
-
Child KingsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
« Time is a child playing draughts; the kingship is a child’s. »
-
Of trotting horses & angelic wordsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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.
-
Texting with … Ece Temelkuran (2)This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
« We are not aware of how defeated we are as intellectuals. »
-
Queen of the nightThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Maria Theresa, Habsburg empress, created the modern European state. To ponder her reign is to ask what the Enlightenment was — and is. Be careful…
-
My untranslatable nameThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
When my parents went to register my name after I was born, they carried out an especially elaborate plan. They acquired a chocolate bar