Issue Two
December 2022
Issue Two of Europe’s new république des lettres. Essays, reportage, interview, photography and experiment by writers from Europe and beyond. Wisdom for an anxious age and well-sharpened profanity for a vulgar one. New books, invented languages, resurrected darlings, and to every reader their own Dichter und Denker. Plus paranormal detectives and Chinese palindromes (read it twice!).
Skinned alive
Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
Flags & bones
On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
A recipe for word vomit
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.
The room I am in
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
The South Bronx did not exist
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Spoiler alert: it did.
A sangre fría
Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
Curtain call
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
Possession, demonic vs mundane
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Not by the devil but by my fellow mortals.
Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.
← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
求索 & 层云
→ → 求索 / 你引导我来未来
← ← 来未来我导引你 / 索求
The Archipelago Conversations, an excerpt
— Interview with Édouard Glissant
An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »
Of human children & language children
The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Back to the office
From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?
Coagulated soy juice
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Lucia Berlin belonged to a less sanctimonious age than ours.
When the world makes rags of us
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
An Odessa conga line
〖 A killed darling 〗 Back to work? Back to play? Hard to say.
A can-can dancer performs a Christmas tree
〖 A killed darling 〗 Being alone in a new city over the holidays was wonderful and, as it happened, not to be repeated.
K-pop nostalgia
〖 A killed darling 〗 Human idols are hardly perfect.
Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
Glossomania-mania
On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
Dinosaurs + dolphins
〖 A killed darling 〗 A joke format that endured for precisely one week.
Longing + debt
〖 A killed darling 〗 And — I failed. I replaced this paragraph.
Marx and the art of natural winemaking
The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
Cheers!
A photograph found in Rome’s Porta Portese. The recumbent can also raise a glass.
Books reviewed in this issue
Lady Susan
Reviewed by Wiegertje Postma
Aqui no es Miami
Reviewed by Caroline Tracey
Temporada de huracanes
Reviewed by Caroline Tracey
Páradais
Reviewed by Caroline Tracey
La Pelle
Reviewed by Mathieu Segers
Diario di uno straniero a Parigi
Reviewed by Mathieu Segers
Der europäische Traum: Vier Lehren aus der Geschichte
Reviewed by Mathieu Segers
Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions
Reviewed by Ed Simon
The Last White Man
Reviewed by Sander Pleij
Жидівський король
Reviewed by Svetlana Lavochkina
La coscienza di Zeno
Reviewed by Christy Wampole
Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History
Reviewed by Gabriel Rom