Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.

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 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.

Fragen, Antworten, Quintessenzen.

German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name: fiction, drama, literary criticism, and non-fiction. 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?

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?

A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.

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?

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?

A short story about fiction, from the author of Plunder.

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.

As an academic field, « 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.

A poem, plus a note on tongue-like mice and the translation of mice-like tongues.

When they were first released, Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a world away. But both ask whether the many freedoms we enjoy 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.

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.

« What if all fictional characters from novels continue to dwell somewhere, just like the dead? » Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment (Trýznivé město) is a magical-realist trilogy set in Prague. Her fragmented narratives, sewn together, make something deeply European.

In 2010, OMA was invited to take part in a competition for the Damascus National Museum. It was part of a concerted effort to establish connections with Bashar al-Assad, toward a political « rapprochement ». Three months later, the entire effort was cancelled. Civil war was about to break out.

Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. The problem is, in part, a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.

Пространство—это ключевое слово в понимании литературной и философической истории России. Оксана Васякина переделывает русское пространство—и русский роман—для женских миров.