Literature
A recipe for word vomit
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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
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On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
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?
How Americans edit sex out of my writing
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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.
To see a city
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« 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.
A breast is a breast is a breast
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To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.
Why we write
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A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic than others. Because of you, we can be conscious of the kinds and the workings of the narratives that set out to deaden us, lessen us, make us lie, make us part of the lie. »
Eat the dust
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Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. » What martyrdoms does today’s bookishness portend?
Beyond thalassophobia
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German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name. It is tempting to read his fiction for glimpses of Green political futures, and his literary criticism for similar clues. How experimental can a literary politician be?
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No one would have understood both the sentiment and the absurdity more keenly than Marx himself, whose face has adorned real currencies in more countries than anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Elizabeth II.
Woman is space
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« 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.
Football is not football
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How do literary movements arise? About thirty years ago, I watched one emerge out of nothing: the subgenre of « literary » football books and magazines. Not exactly the birth of modernism, but it still taught me something about how cultural transmission works within Europe.