
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
Пространство—это ключевое слово в понимании литературной и философической истории России. Оксана Васякина переделывает русское пространство—и русский роман—для женских миров.
« 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.