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Library / Reviews
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.

Flags & bones
Mathieu Segers

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?

Vlaggen & botten
Mathieu Segers

Over het Europa van Curzio Malaparte – en het onze. Een nieuwe lezing van het oeuvre van de schrijver, over de nasleep van oorlog en een transatlantische romance. Wat is dit « naoorlogse Europa » eigenlijk?

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.

Into the muck
Noam Maggor

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?

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.