Alcohol
Visit the extractocene!
published in
The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.
Flags & bones
published in
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?
Skinned alive
published in
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
published in
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.
The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden
published in
A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
published in
You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
published in
What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.
Animal Anti-Cities
published in
« A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm’s width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino’s cat flâneurs.
Ballad of a Homburg hat
published in
On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)
It wasn’t the beer
published in
How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?
