Ten Issues in — and Europe keeps thinking
With Issue Ten, our golden Jubilee, we celebrate ten editions of independent, multilingual writing that crosses languages, borders and expectations.
At a time when culture is flattened into opinion and noise, the European Review of Books is a space for reflection — a space inhabited by writers, editors and readers who believe Europe deserves better critique and the best writing.
Celebrate with us
Join the circle that keeps Europe thinking
A special Jubilee gift for a limited time only
Our Jubilee offerings
To celebrate Issue Ten, we bring gifts!
A tote bag
Become a member, gift a membership or give us a donation –– and we will send you a tote.
A pin
Become a Benefactor – the ultimate member of ERB – and we will gift you the proper badge: the ERB pin, (along with full set of the ERB merch).
Sticker sheet
Join ERB with a digital-only annual membership – and we will gift you a vignette-sticker sheet
And to all our friends out there — we will send you a free ERB tote bag for your kindness, too:
Gift a membership
Give the gift of reflection — the perfect offering for a friend or a loved one.
Every gift membership widens the circle of readers who keep European writing alive.
Donate!
More! You can also Donate to ERB and keep the European stage of ideas going.
If you would like to ensure the European intellectual space by supporting ERB with a substantial amount: contact founding editors Sander Pleij and Wiegertje Postma: info@europeanreviewofbooks.com
To our donors from across the Atlantic: we’re truly grateful you’re also keeping this European stage afloat.
Our humble bragging from the European stage
Ten Issues in and ––
150+
essays, reviews & stories — and pearls
100+
contributors from 30+ countries
12+
languages: English, Ukrainian, Catalan, Korean, German, Danish, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian… and more
250+
bookshops in 20 countries carry the ERB
Awards
⇢ Issue One was selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs
⇢ Silver in the Magazine category at the European Design Awards (2023)
⇢ Award for Alexander Fanta — for his ERB essay on Google’s power in Europe in Bavaria, Germany
Events & more
⇢ Our first issue prompted a mini-conference at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
⇢ At the University of Amsterdam, « Is Europe a joke? » became an evening of irony, tragedy, and geopolitics.
⇢ We’ve launched issues in Berlin’s ACUD Macht Neu, read in underground Amsterdam clubs, and spoken at Princeton, N+1 in New York, and soon will do at the Royal Academy of Art in London.
⇢ Our courses reach students in Florence and Amsterdam; our pieces return in university syllabi and course readers.
⇢ From Stanford to Venice, twenty institutions now subscribe — and hundreds of thousands of students can read the ERB through their libraries.
Why ERB matters
We think there is a need for a European Review of Books, as well as a desire.
THE EUROPEAN
We want to thicken the « European » intellectual atmosphere. A truly plural, vibrantly « European » perspective is yet to flourish.
Not some mythical « Europe » of nostalgia or utopia to which we would harken back, but the one where we happen to live. The Europe we would love is not dying, because it has never existed. The Europe to which we want to give form is the broadest Europe.
« European », to us, is an incantation, for there are a thousand Europes: the common, the migrant, the tourist, the postcolonial Europe, the Schengen Europe, the Europe with euros and the one without them, the Europe of Eurovision, the pre-national and post-national, and perhaps already the post-European Europe.
We want to create an independent institution that endures, that broadens even the broadest definition of Europe
Culture in Europe filters through national and metropolitan sieves; we read, and edit, beyond them –– we cultivate more writers, new to you, known in their own language; intelligent dissent, the good kind of disharmony, a lively cacophony.
« Europe » deserves better critique — a modern and multilingual république des lettres, where literature, culture and scholarship meet at an elevated yet accessible level. Here, ideas (that would have remained buried within a single national country) cross borders.
Read it twice, zweimal, twaris, dvakrát, faoi dhó. English is our common tongue but the ERB is multilingual. We resist, and play with, the hegemony of English. We use that lingua franca to animate the untranslatable, to discover new writers and new solidarities, within and beyond « Europe ».
REVIEW
We want to view –– and view again. The « review » has been reduced to decoration, entertainment, tip, from one to five stars.
A good essay is the antidote to the measly « opinion », the enemy of the airy platitude. We want avenues to the grand. The writing you want to read, and read again.
We believe in depth over speed, in writers to be able to get it right, even if getting it right takes a mountain of drafts. That’s the kind of writing that drowns in clickbait, that perishes first when budgets run dry.
Great writing travels where borders cannot.
OF BOOKS
Yes, The European Review of Books. …and film, and art, and music, theater, architecture, technology, games, culture, narrative, ideas, philosophy, geopolitics. Come what may –– in forms of essay, criticism, travelogue, parody, poem. No rants and provocation, to be honest –– but pearls, stories and photography.
We emerge from books because we are committed to what a book represents: a capsule, a human record, aimed at both the present and the future (and somewhere in there is the past too).
Celebrate Issue 10 with us.
Read. Join. Support.
Help Europe think for itself again.
