The coldest, cleanest water in Europe
Solitary sailing, and the philosophy thereof: What sort of writing is possible when the mind is at sea and so entirely occupied and swaddled?
Ice queens, sex machines
Insofar as erotica can ever be about something, what is Russia-themed erotica about?
What an animal isn’t
Two vastly different books — one a picaresque tale, the other a dystopian meditation — both recount a transition from human to animal or from animal to human.
Jesus in the pines
Refugees and border guards in the Białowieża Forest. Scenes of violence play out behind a thick cover of trees, in a remote corner of Poland.
The big beige books
The most important unreviewed books of our times, reviewed. On Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, Volumes I to IV
Europe disenchanted
A broad cast of characters who almost all speak to a solitary woe. This is Europe?
Forget your darlings
On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.
On location
Mission: Impossible and Eurocentric stunts, from Hollywood to Hong Kong. What does an action movie want to be?
How to people a landscape
On Cyril Schäublin’s Unrueh (2022), cinema & scale. « No other film has so resized me. »
The cemetery-goer
On the travels of Karl-Markus Gauß, and the unlikely guardians of the dream of Europe.
Doom is in the details
Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.
The pulverization of memory
Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
Tragedy & farce in climate commentary
« 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?
The invention of austerity
Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?
When the world makes rags of us
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
Flags & bones
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?
Of human children & language children
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.
Skinned alive
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.
A sangre fría
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.
Glossomania-mania
On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
A recipe for word vomit
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
Into the muck
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?
To see a city
« 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.
The prodigal half-rooster
Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a world away. But both ask whether freedoms 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.
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.
Woman is space
« 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.
The myth of 1922
What does modern mean? In Brazil, it often meant an embrace of newness as the possibility of reinvention. In Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, Rafael Cardoso unravels the myth of 1922.
