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Library / Reviews
Forget your darlings
Marisa Libbon

On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.

Europe disenchanted
Gabriel Rom

A broad cast of characters who almost all speak to a solitary woe. This is Europe? Ben Judah depicts a continent of islands, hollowed of associational life.

On location
George Blaustein

Mission: Impossible and Eurocentric stunts, from Hollywood to Hong Kong. What does an action movie want to be?

Tragedy & farce in climate commentary
Ingo Venzke

« We are fucked » vs. « It’s not too late ». The Club of Rome’s Earth for All offers a burst of stubborn optimism. But when does stubborn optimism become cruel optimism?

No man’s land
Sarah Watling

On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?

The invention of austerity
Charles S. Maier

Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?

The pulverization of memory
Eloisa Morra

Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.

Doom is in the details
Peter Frederick Matthews

Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.

The cemetery-goer
Walter Grünzweig

On the travels of Karl-Markus Gauß, and the unlikely guardians of the dream of Europe.

How to people a landscape
Christy Wampole

On Cyril Schäublin’s Unrueh (2022), cinema & scale. « No other film has so resized me. »

Glossomania-mania
Ed Simon

On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.

Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
Sander Pleij

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

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.

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.

A sangre fría
Caroline Tracey

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.

A recipe for word vomit
Wiegertje Postma

On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.