Issue Zero – Opuscule

MAY 2021

Issue Zero was our digital opuscule, in May and June, 2021. It was a start, coincident with our crowdfunding campaign, where we could show what we wanted to publish and reflect on the endeavor itself. What should be in the European Review of Books? What could only be in the European Review of Books? We wanted to show the gears.

  • Do we need a European Review of Books?

    « If I were to do it again from scratch, » Jean Monnet, a founder of the European Union, supposedly said in the ’70s, « I would start with culture. » Well, who wouldn’t?

  • Only stupidity is hereditary

    There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a way that we can clearly see the pages. It is a family tree of sorts, with eight rows of seventeen standing donkeys.

  • Infrequently Asked Questions

    Who, what, and why? Imagine something called, say, the Zemblan Review of Books, or the Esperanto Review of Political Theory, or the Klingon Review of Horticulture, or the Utopian Review of Bicycles.

  • On the anti-poetry of « crowdfunding campaign »

    Kickstarting used to be something you did to an engine. To « kickstart » the European Review of Books makes it feel like we’re riding a motorcycle in World War I. But we only want peace!

  • The ordinary jacket of today

    The ERB doesn’t stand in competition with magazines we love; it joins them, and does so in admiration. This project has made us encounter literary magazines we hadn’t read before and discover beautiful magazines in languages we wish we could read.

  • The final frontier

    New short fiction from the author of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. A story about what’s ours and what’s not ours.

  • Stupid illnesses called « childhood »

    An excerpt from I padri lontani / Distant Fathers (1987), the rediscovered memoir of Marina Jarre, available in English translation from New Vessel Press.

  • Football is not football

    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.

  • By misadventure

    A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »

  • The pinnacle of cartography is the pinnacle of uselessness

    « Europe », drawn from memory or intuition. Thick and thin strokes of charcoal: a nod to the coal and steel on which the polity of modern Europe is founded. But more mystical, too: these drawings represent « the conviction that simple tools can grant us the power to face the god of paper. »

  • The myth of 1922

    What does modern mean? In Brazil, it often meant an embrace of newness as the possibility of reinvention. In Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, Rafael Cardoso unravels the myth of 1922.

  • A messy optical process

    On orthodoxies & heresies of typography. To serif, or sans-serif?

  • A rather disproportionate intervention

    An excerpt from Ijoma Mangold’s memoir, Das Deutsche Krokodil (The German Crocodile), available in English translation from the DAS Editions imprint of Digitalback Books

  • Europas & bulls

    A logo might start as a designer’s whim. Only then does one look for meanings to fill it with. On Europas: mythic, artistic, fictional, political, psychological, satirical, and finally unfinished.

This site is registered on wpml.org as a development site. Switch to a production site key to remove this banner.