Issue One
JUNE 2022
Our first print issue, sprawling by design. Essays spanning the archaeological and the astronautical. Reviews of old books in new translation, and reviews of new books in non-translation. Plus fiction, poetry, anecdote, remembrance, collage, photography, and questions-not-so-frequently-asked.
« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because…
Into the muck
Time? For? Socialism? What happened when Thomas Piketty descended from the elegant mathematical Olympus of…
All is not vanity
Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
To see a city
« What if all fictional characters from novels continue to dwell somewhere, just like the dead? »…
Optimize this headline for Google*
Google’s rise to dominance can seem inevitable, and its power over publishers monolithic. Yet Google’s…
On paths not taken
« Genocide Studies » is a house with many rooms. It accommodates and even encourages…
A breast is a breast is a breast
To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the…
Place, non-place, place
« What happened was that we were driving on the highway from Izola towards Koper…
Ballad of a Homburg hat
On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever…
The prodigal half-rooster
Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a…
The void that fills the void
Relics, and the places devoted to their worship, dotted the map of Europe and the…
Why we write
A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic…
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an…
It wasn’t the beer
How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and…
Eat the dust
Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled…
Beyond thalassophobia
German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name. It is tempting…
How to write; or, how to insult
Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after…
Who will speak European? A puzzle
Brussels is a concave mirror that returns a concentrated (and somewhat distorted) reflection of the…
On learning to write again
Ramallah, downtown, fifth floor. The phone rings and the caller’s number appears on the screen.…
VOID FILL
On multinational packaging systems, « inflated fictions of transparency », desire and fulfillment.
Cretan Europa’s second coming
Citizen’s day in Fiesole, December 2021. In the EU, Christian Europe stands in quantum superposition,…
Woman is space
« Space », or prostranstvo, is a key word for understanding the literary and philosophical history of…
By misadventure
A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black…
A kayak in Zierikzee
Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of…
Only stupidity is hereditary
There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a…