We use cookies
This website uses cookies in order to improve your browsing experience. Read more on our cookie policies.
Accept
Refuse
Library
Browse, sort, shuffle, scramble.
Subscribers have full access to the expanding library of the European Review of Books.
Type
Essays
From the editors
Interviews
Pearls
Reviews
Stories
Clear filters
Ok
Topic
Architecture
Art
Economics
Europe
Excerpt
Fiction
Film
History
Literature
Memoir
Photography
Poetry
Politics
Technology
Clear filters
Ok
Motif
Alcohol
America
Ancestry
Animals
Archeology
Bad art
Bad writing
Berlin
Big Tech
Borders
Brazil
Brooklyn
Cars
Celebrity
Childhood
Dante
Death
Design
Devil
Dichter und Denker
Divinity
Dreams
EU
Editing
Empire
Environment
Epistles
Etymology
Fascism
Fashion
Father
Faulkner
Fetishes
Flags
Flâneur
Food
Forgetting
Found art
Freud
Frontiers
George Orwell
Gibberish
Good art
Gossip
Gulag
Helicopter
Influencers
Insults
Into the void
Islands
Jane Austen
Journalism
Kafka
Keywords
Kidnapping
Language
Literary Criticism
Love
Magazines
Manners
Maps
Marx
Max Weber
Memory
Modernism
Modernity
Monarchy
Money
Mother
Mountains
Music
Mythology
Noise
Pandemic
Paranormality
Paris
Phobias
Poetry
Post-industrial
Prague
Prison
Psychology
Race
Reading
Relics
Russia
Sea
Siberia
Slavery
Snow
Space
Sports
Syria
Teenager
Tinder
Tourism
Travel
Ukraine
Underpants
Utopia
Vertigo
Virginia Woolf
Vomit
Walter Benjamin
War
Writing
Clear filters
Ok
Language
Arabic
Dansk
Deutsch
English
Español
Italiano
Valencià
Українська
русский
中文
한국어
Clear filters
Ok
Issue
Issue One
Issue Two
Issue Zero – Opuscule
Clear filters
Ok
20
Articles
Literature
All Motifs
All languages
Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
Sander Pleij

On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.

Review
Of human children & language children
Svetlana Lavochkina

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.

Review
Skinned alive
Christy Wampole

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.

Review
When the world makes rags of us
Gabriel Rom

He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.

Review
On Kafkaesque pedagogy
Giorgio Fontana

Not the nightmare one might instinctively expect. Franz Kafka and Stig Dagerman on parenthood vs. educatorhood: who can educate a child?

Pearl
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
Francesco Pacifico

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.

Essay
A breast is a breast is a breast
Alide Cagidemetrio
To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.
Essay
Beyond thalassophobia
Walter Grünzweig

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?

Essay
Eat the dust
Patricio Pron

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?

Essay
To see a city
Alexander Wells

« 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.

Review
« When I was silent… »
— Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
Sander Pleij

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.

Interview
Why we write
Ali Smith

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. »

Essay
Женщина—это и есть пространство
Caroline Tracey

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
Caroline Tracey

« 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.

Review
€ 0
George Blaustein

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.

Pearl
Football is not football
Simon Kuper

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.

Essay
A kayak in Zierikzee
George Blaustein

Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.

Essay
The ordinary jacket of today
The Editors

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.

From the editors
Subscribe to the ERB
Access to the full library from €4.50 per month.