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Subscribers have full access to the expanding library of the European Review of Books.
Subscribers have full access to the expanding library of the European Review of Books.
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73
Articles
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A Silence Shared
« If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »
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.
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.
Cheers!
A photograph found in Rome’s Porta Portese. The recumbent can also raise a glass.
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.
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?
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! »
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.
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. »
Kill your darlings
Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
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?
Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
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.
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.
The room I am in
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
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
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.
On Kafkaesque pedagogy
Not the nightmare one might instinctively expect. Franz Kafka and Stig Dagerman on parenthood vs. educatorhood: who can educate a child?
The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden
A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.
Back to the office
From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?
No pity
The documentary When spring came to Bucha reaches beyond common representations of war and one-dimensional victimhood.
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. »
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.
An Unlucky Man
« He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. »
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.
A Madman’s Tale
« I guess it all began, » he said, « because of that weak-headedness my father sometimes had. It just rubbed me the wrong way. »
Contalla d'un orat
« —Tot va ser, passe a creure—començà—, per enfellonir-me d’aquella mena de fluixedat de cap que agafà al meu pare. »
Borderland
The great storm surge is coming, it has always been coming in the borderland between Denmark and Germany. Here, Danish writer Dorthe Nors visits the Frisian Wadden Sea island of Sylt, as part of her travels along the North Sea coast.
Grænseland
The great storm surge is coming, it has always been coming in the borderland between Denmark and Germany. Here, Danish writer Dorthe Nors visits the Frisian Wadden Sea island of Sylt, as part of her travels along the North Sea coast.
A breast is a breast is a breast
To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.
All is not vanity
Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
Animal Anti-Cities
« A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm's width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino's cat flâneurs.
Animalische Anti-Städte
« Eine schwarze Katze huscht über ein Blumenbeet in Richtung eines Holzverschlags, an einigen Astern vorbei drückt sie sich in eine armbreite Lücke. Einige Abgefeierte lümmeln auf Sofas; in Schweiß und Rauch in dieser spätsommerlichen Club-Landschaft. » Über Berliner Clubs und Calvinos Katzenflaneure.
Ballad of a Homburg hat
On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)
Bee Gees FAQ
Fragen, Antworten, Quintessenzen.
Beyond thalassophobia
German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name. It is tempting to read his fiction for glimpses of Green political futures, and his literary criticism for similar clues. How experimental can a literary politician be?
Cretan Europa’s second coming
Citizen’s day in Fiesole, December 2021. In the EU, Christian Europe stands in quantum superposition, both here and not here. Can Cretan Europa help us imagine better futures?
Eat the dust
Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. » What martyrdoms does today’s bookishness portend?
Europas & bulls
A logo might start as a designer’s whim. Only then does one look for meanings to fill it with. On Europas: mythic, artistic, fictional, political, psychological, satirical, and finally unfinished.
Firsts in space
A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.
How to write; or, how to insult
Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after class, a boisterous wrestling over insults exchanged. Nothing to be concerned about. Acquiring knowledge was, after all, a combative affair.
Into the muck
Time? For? Socialism? What happened when Thomas Piketty descended from the elegant mathematical Olympus of economic theory into the muck of political and economic crises, public debates, social confrontations, and competing visions of progress?
It wasn’t the beer
How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?
Es war nicht das Bier
Wie konnte es sein, dass trotz jahrzehntelanger rigoroser europäischer Einigung, offener Grenzen und weitgehend angeglichener Lebensstandards ein Virus in einem Land bis zu 40 Mal mehr Menschen töten konnte als in einem anderen, nur wenige hundert Kilometer entfernt?
Welcome to the ERB
A greeting from the editors. We hope you like what we’ve made.
Metaphrasis
A short story about fiction, from the author of Plunder.
On learning to write again
Ramallah, downtown, fifth floor. The phone rings and the caller’s number appears on the screen. It’s an unknown number. And yet a call that comes at this hour must be answered.
تعلُّم الكتابة من جديد
رام الله، وسط البلد، الطابق الخامس. يرن الهاتف ويظهر رقم المتّصل على الشاشة. إنه ليس لأحد معارفنا، فالرقم غير معروف. مع ذلك، يتطلّبُ اتصال هاتفي في ساعة مبكِّرةٍ كهذه الردَّ عليه.
On paths not taken
« Genocide Studies » is a house with many rooms. It accommodates and even encourages a broadening of its central concept. And like all academic fields, it presumes its object of study will always be there.
Optimize this headline for Google*
Google’s rise to dominance can seem inevitable, and its power over publishers monolithic. Yet Google’s wanton disruption of publishing resembles evolution more than intelligent design. Journalists, publishers, regulators, and scholars are left grappling with our new, random god.
Optimiere diese Schlagzeile für Google*
Googles Dominanz erscheint heute unausweichlich. Googles mutwillige Störung des Verlagswesens ähnelt eher der Evolution als intelligentem Design. Journalisten, Verleger, Regulierungsbehörden und Wissenschaftler müssen mit ihrer neuen, chaotischen Gottheit zu Recht kommen.
Place, non-place, place
« What happened was that we were driving on the highway from Izola towards Koper when we saw a drummer on the side of the road. So I immediately drove to the side of the road and reversed my car and asked if I could take some pictures. »
¿Quién hablará Européen? Un puzle
La capital de Europa es, en ese sentido, un espejo cóncavo que devuelve un reflejo concentrado (y algo deforme) de la imagen que proyecta el continente.
Who will speak European? A puzzle
Brussels is a concave mirror that returns a concentrated (and somewhat distorted) reflection of the projection of its continent.
설탕생쥐
A poem, plus a note on tongue-like mice and the translation of mice-like tongues.
Sugar Mouse
A poem, plus a note on tongue-like mice and the translation of mice-like tongues
The prodigal half-rooster
Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a world away. But both ask whether freedoms mean anything if they are not practiced in public, and if they are not passed on — and whether the word « freedom » means anything at all.
The void that fills the void
Relics, and the places devoted to their worship, dotted the map of Europe and the Middle East. Saints, like today’s celebrities, were both omnipresent and faraway, once-vulnerable people who became something more than human.
To see a city
« What if all fictional characters from novels continue to dwell somewhere, just like the dead? » Sewn together, the fragmented narratives of Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment (Trýznivé město) make something deeply European.
Україна вчора і завтра
Україна не стала епіцентром світової історії раптово. Україна стала епіцентром світової історії знову.
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.
Unclaimed, claimed, unclaimable
On unrecognized states, micronations and curious border zones.
VOID FILL
On multinational packaging systems, « inflated fictions of transparency », desire and fulfillment.
What is a pillar?
In 2010, OMA was invited to take part in a competition for the Damascus National Museum. It was part of a concerted effort toward a political « rapprochement » with Bashar al-Assad. Three months later, the entire effort was cancelled. Civil war was about to break out.
« When I was silent… »
— Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
Why we write
A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic than others. Because of you, we can be conscious of the kinds and the workings of the narratives that set out to deaden us, lessen us, make us lie, make us part of the lie. »
Женщина—это и есть пространство
Пространство—это ключевое слово в понимании литературной и философической истории России. Оксана Васякина переделывает русское пространство—и русский роман—для женских миров.
Woman is space
« Space », or prostranstvo, is a key word for understanding the literary and philosophical history of Russia. Oksana Vasyakina’s Rana (Wound), a Siberian road novel, remakes the Russian landscape and the Russian novel for women’s worlds. It renders prostranstvo unruly, polysemous, queer.
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No one would have understood both the sentiment and the absurdity more keenly than Marx himself, whose face has adorned real currencies in more countries than anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Elizabeth II.
A rather disproportionate intervention
An excerpt from Ijoma Mangold’s memoir, Das Deutsche Krokodil (The German Crocodile), available in English translation from the DAS Editions imprint of Digitalback Books
Eine ziemlich nachhaltige Einmischung
An excerpt from Ijoma Mangold’s memoir, Das Deutsche Krokodil (The German Crocodile), available in English translation from the DAS Editions imprint of Digitalback Books
A messy optical process
On orthodoxies & heresies of typography. To serif, or sans-serif?
The myth of 1922
What does modern mean? In Brazil, it often meant an embrace of newness as the possibility of reinvention. In Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, Rafael Cardoso unravels the myth of 1922.
The pinnacle of cartography is the pinnacle of uselessness
« Europe », drawn from memory or intuition. Thick and thin strokes of charcoal: a nod to the coal and steel on which the polity of modern Europe is founded. But more mystical, too: these drawings represent « the conviction that simple tools can grant us the power to face the god of paper. »
By misadventure
A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »
Football is not football
How do literary movements arise? About thirty years ago, I watched one emerge out of nothing: the subgenre of « literary » football books and magazines. Not exactly the birth of modernism, but it still taught me something about how cultural transmission works within Europe.
A kayak in Zierikzee
Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.
Stupid illnesses called « childhood »
An excerpt from I padri lontani / Distant Fathers (1987), the rediscovered memoir of Marina Jarre, available in English translation from New Vessel Press.
The final frontier
New short fiction from the author of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. A story about what’s ours and what’s not ours.
The ordinary jacket of today
The ERB doesn’t stand in competition with magazines we love; it joins them, and does so in admiration. This project has made us encounter literary magazines we hadn’t read before and discover beautiful magazines in languages we wish we could read.
On the anti-poetry of « crowdfunding campaign »
Kickstarting used to be something you did to an engine. To « kickstart » the European Review of Books makes it feel like we’re riding a motorcycle in World War I. But we only want peace!
Infrequently Asked Questions
Who, what, and why? Imagine something called, say, the Zemblan Review of Books, or the Esperanto Review of Political Theory, or the Klingon Review of Horticulture, or the Utopian Review of Bicycles.
Only stupidity is hereditary
There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a way that we can clearly see the pages. It is a family tree of sorts, with eight rows of seventeen standing donkeys.
Do we need a European Review of Books?
« If I were to do it again from scratch, » Jean Monnet, a founder of the European Union, supposedly said in the ’70s, « I would start with culture. » Well, who wouldn’t?
