June 2019

by Nicholas Rombes From Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine, 2014. The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind. The sentence appears a little over halfway through the book in the section titled “February 26, 2102 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” and it...

On a hot and humid summer’s evening in New York City in 1969, the tranquility of a small park in Queens was disturbed by jarring sounds of sawing and chopping and the thump of trees toppling to the ground.

Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms

No one expected the final stage of the Conservative party leadership contest to be a staid and dignified affair. The Tories are now more spectacle than party, more farcical roadshow than government.

The short novel or story can be so condensed it requires multiple scans, just like a poem. I read Xanthi Barker’s nouvelle three times and each time had a different response.

Kaveh Yazdani, in India, Modernity and the Great Divergence, provides the readers with a case study of Mysore and Gujarat to explain why precolonial India could not experience an economic take-off similar to the one that happened in western Europe.

by Nicholas Rombes From Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, 2016. Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be...

There was a point somewhere between birth and puberty when I would spend hours drawing pictures of bearded men. What interested me most was the beards themselves...

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world...

I can never go back and know what, as an infant, I first felt, what my original sensations were, nor can I recapture the initial experience of moving, of being touched

Ronald Reagan dies, goes to hell, eventually earns his horns and pitchfork and comes back up here to bedevil us again. It’s years later now.

A dozen women sitting on the streets in Warsaw were surrounded by middle-aged male protestors wearing ‘football hooligan’ red-and-white scarves. There were insults, kicking...

Not “my mother stayed alive” but “my mother’s body.” The sentence comes near the midpoint of the novel as the narrator thinks back to the death of her parents. Her mother is in a coma where...

It is early June in 2018. As the lights go down to signal the beginning of “So what do you want to know? An evening with Nick Cave” held at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin...

According to correspondence between Rowland Hazard and his cousin, he had daily sessions with Jung in Zürich over several months, and stopped drinking...

Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman—I forget his name—who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in...

Today, we find ourselves encountering a new Southern strategy that appeals, in addition to old racist division, to isolating the structural violence of women, as if the issues of unwanted pregnancy, poverty...

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365.

When Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun began publishing articles last year criticizing the government’s turn toward a harsher variety of authoritarianism...

The idea of Christus medicus, Christ the Physician, is a commonplace in late medieval religious texts. In Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England, Daniel McCann...