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Issue Eleven

MAY 2026

A breath of fresh air as the summer heat sets in — sage. This issue: A descent into European populist algorithms on TikTok, and a descent into the European unconscious. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio on a French stage, and the birth of simultaneous translation on the stage of the Nuremberg Trials. The wartime lessons learned by Stefan Zweig, Marcel Proust & Romain Roland in the 1910s, and the wartime lessons learned by a Ukrainian geese herder in the 2020s. A fishy kiss from Julio Cortázar, psychopathic AI, fathers and sons holding hands. Fiction by Ananda Devi, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo & Oksana Vasyakina.

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  • Fathers & SonsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Valery Poshtarov

    For some of the men in Poshtarov’s photo series, it was the first time they held hands in years – even decades.

  • Series | Portobello

    Tommaso Corvi-Mora

    ITALY — The six-episode television series Portobello is the latest work by the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio.

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  • What do Europeans dream about?This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Tania Roettger

    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 without god. »

  • Documentary | 2m² 

    Çağla Aribal

    TURKEY/BELGIUM — If a Turkish migrant dies in Belgium, where and how should their loved ones visit them?

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  • Psychopaths and AI never know when to shut upThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Elina Nerantzi

    What Patrick Bateman, ChatGPT and Sara Machina have in common.

  • Books | Interview Elina Alter

    Fernanda Eberstadt

    RUSSIA IN EXILE — A Q&A with the translator and editor, who recommends Russian writers-in-exile to read.

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  • Collective punishmentThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    E.K. Myerson

    When pirates captured two British merchant ships, the Genoese of England were put on trial.

  • Book | Les Lumières sombres 

    Alastair Bruton

    FRANCE — Arnaud Miranda’s Les Lumières sombres is a book about the most radical challenge to liberal democracy since Communism.

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  • Book & film | Housing! 

    Daniel Gascón

    SPAIN — Home and homelessness are at the center of Spanish public anxiety. This has created a new branch of literature — for the moment, mostly non-fiction.

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  • Books | Butchers!

    Sigrid Kraus

    THE LONDON BOOK FAIR — A new trend I noticed at the London Book Fair: young European novelists writing about butchers and the meat industry.

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  • Book | The Ice Prophet

    Sander Pleij

    THE NETHERLANDS — While reading this new book about « Iceman » Wim Hof, one scene lodged itself most prominently in my mind: the one in which he goes to Amsterdam’s Vondelpark and decides to sit bare-assed on a fountain that perpetually shoots liters of water skywards.

  • Book | White Moss

    Wiegertje Postma

    THE ARCTIC CIRCLE — An interview with Irina Sadovina, who recently translated a novel set in a nomadic Indigenous Nenets community in Northern Siberia, by Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi.

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  • Book | La fine del mondo 

    Francesco Pacifico

    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, hypochondriac boomer.

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  • The dog who bit everyone

    Fernanda Eberstadt

    Fifty-one years after his death, Pasolini’s vision of capitalism is even more urgent. A new play examines his unfinished masterpiece.

  • Magazine | Granta 174: Therapy

    Fernanda Eberstadt

    ENGLAND — The Freud Museum. A loud merry gang of writers and friends crowded the rooms of the large London house where Dr. Freud settled and received his patients after fleeing the Nazis.

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  • A kiss like a fish in the mouth

    Nora Muñiz

    My schoolgirl passion for Julio Cortázar brings me to a Montparnasse grave with one husband and two wives.

  • Curing my lying

    Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

    An excerpt from the novel Attention-Seeking Behaviour (Peninsula Press, 2026) by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo. « My being able to talk was most of the problem in the first place. »

  • The cudgellers’ dilemmaThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Frances Butler

    What Goya’s Black Paintings can tell us about current Spanish climate struggles.

  • Processing evil

    Peter Frederick Matthews

    The Nuremberg trials saw the birth of simultaneous interpretation. Hermann Göring especially manipulated this new system of translation for his own purposes. « Where Eichmann embodied the banality of evil, Göring stood for something like its virtuosity. »

  • The death of an unknown womanThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Oksana Vasyakina

    A story about falling, translated by Elina Alter.

  • KRIEG

    Sander Pleij

    Stefan Zweig, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann & Romain Rolland: lessons from the trenches, for AI models

  • The pain-laden rhyme

    Anna Arno

    An excerpt from a new biography on the life and poetry of Paul Celan.

  • Vova stopped killing the geeseThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Aleksander Palikot

    When the Russians occupied his village.

  • A story of flesh

    Ananda Devi

    Excerpt from All Flesh (Pushkin Press, 2026), translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

  • It’s all about poetic swimmers

    Philippe Huneman

    « I am a philosopher, and philosophers do not often like to use big words. »

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  • Feeling political together

    Hazar Deniz Eker

    A four-hour journey into populist algorithms, and a soup that never got made.