The most important unreviewed books of our times, reviewed. On Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, Volumes I to IV
On Paleolithic painters & speculative criticism.
On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.
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.
Mission: Impossible and Eurocentric stunts, from Hollywood to Hong Kong. What does an action movie want to be?
« 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?
On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?
Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?
Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.
On the travels of Karl-Markus Gauß, and the unlikely guardians of the dream of Europe.
On Cyril Schäublin’s Unrueh (2022), cinema & scale. « No other film has so resized me. »
On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
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.
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.
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.