Alcohol

  • Visit the extractocene!

    Visit the extractocene!

    The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.

  • Flags & bones

    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?

  • Skinned alive

    Skinned alive

    Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.

  • A sangre fría

    A sangre fría

    Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.

  • Cheers!

    Cheers!

    A photograph found in Rome’s Porta Portese. The recumbent can also raise a glass.

  • The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden

    The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden

    A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.

  • Planes, tanks & automobiles

    Planes, tanks & automobiles

    You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.

  • How Americans edit sex out of my writing

    How Americans edit sex out of my writing

    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.

  • Animal Anti-Cities

    Animal Anti-Cities

    « A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm’s width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino’s cat flâneurs.

  • Ballad of a Homburg hat

    Ballad of a Homburg hat

    On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)

  • It wasn’t the beer

    It wasn’t the beer

    How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?

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