August 2016

The remainders of a socialist realist bas-relief on a heap of former Qemal Stafa Stadium debris. Photo from Edi Rama’s Facebook. by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei For the last two months, I have been woken every day by workmen below my apartment building, viciously attempting to renovate the...

This fascinating work of scholarship concerns the association between two great 20th-century writers and the city that brought them together. The writers were the Italian Italo Svevo (1861–1928) and the Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941). The city was Trieste (45˚38’N 13˚46’E).

If Basil Bunting were not remembered for “Briggflatts”—his longest and best poem, first published fifty years ago—he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful twentieth-century life.

To learn more about ghosts, I recently watched the original “Ghostbusters.” It became clear to me, as it had not been when the movie came out, in 1984, when I was seven years old, that ghosts congregate around the enemies of free-market capitalism.

SEARCH FOR: Search… COMMUNITY AND CATASTROPHE weaklings-cover 10TH AUG 2016 IN MISC BY DIARMUID HESTER 0 COMMENTS By now you’ve probably heard about Google deleting Dennis Cooper’s blog and his email account. Just in case, here’s the deal: on 27th of June, Cooper tried to log into his blog, The Weaklings,...

It is Trump’s political legitimacy, however unthinkable, rather than his personality or his rhetoric, that now empowers his campaign. But this is nothing new. Twenty years ago, we watched nationalist leaders display all of these issues vividly on global media during the Bosnian War.

There has never been a painter quite like Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish master who signed his works as Jheronimus Bosch.

I never met Vladimir Nabokov face to face, though I exchanged phone calls and letters with him. My psychiatrist encouraged me to visit him in Switzerland, but I was too afraid that I would quickly sabotage close-up whatever good impression I might have managed to create long-distance.

Colson Whitehead’s novels are rebellious creatures: Each one of them goes to great lengths to break free of the last one, of its structure and language, of its areas of interest.

Unlike the literature it marshals as its subject, literary criticism frequently finds itself in the position of having to defend its existence, of taking breaks from dealing with fiction and poetry in order to deal with itself.

So unprepared had France been for defeat that resistance had had no time to organise in these early days and those who did want to act against the Nazis didn’t know how.

Used cynically, the word “America” is conceptualised not as that undiscovered country yet to be born on maps yet printed, but rather it is to employ the word as simple superstitious talisman. They take the Lord’s name in vain.