Childhood
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Let’s enjoy the moon
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Eight young women live in a college run by nuns in Rome; an excerpt from Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back (Nessuno Torna Indietro).
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Miracle & yonder
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Paul Simon’s Graceland & country music’s global history. «The idea of anti-apartheid country music is counter-intuitive but profound.»
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The Barren Nothing-Place
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On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
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Animal game
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A story about family. « ‘A woman of few words,’ he smiled. ‘How refreshing.’ »
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Doom is in the details
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Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.
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The pulverization of memory
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Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
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No man’s land
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On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?
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A Silence Shared
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« If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »
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« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
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Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
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Two palindromes
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→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
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Glossomania-mania
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On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
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On Kafkaesque pedagogy
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Not the nightmare one might instinctively expect. Franz Kafka and Stig Dagerman on parenthood vs. educatorhood: who can educate a child?