Issue Two
DECEMBER 2022
Issue Two of Europe’s new république des lettres. Essays, reportage, interview, photography and experiment by writers from Europe and beyond. Wisdom for an anxious age and well-sharpened profanity for a vulgar one. New books, invented languages, resurrected darlings, and to every reader their own Dichter und Denker. Plus paranormal detectives and Chinese palindromes (read it twice!).
The Van Leer headquarters is not a fish tank
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Van Leer Headquarters in Aalsmeer.
Curtain call
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
When the world makes rags of us
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
Coagulated soy juice
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Lucia Berlin belonged to a less sanctimonious age than ours.
Flags & bones
On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
Of human children & language children
The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
Kill your darlings
Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »