A Permanent Battle
On New Year’s Day, I went to a bookstore in Cheonan, South Korea, to buy a wall map of the country. The label said, simply, “Map...
An Impulse Felt Round the World
“The surreal today is measured on the scale of our defeats.” Georges Henein, a founding member of a Cairo group of Surrealists, was responding to a...
The Babel Within
A few weeks ago I was invited to the book festival in Trieste, in northeast Italy, a city of divided loyalties and complicated history. At its...
Under Their Skin
The first fictional spacecraft were thrilling, vehicles for exploration and discovery, but it wasn’t long before writers realized that spaceships would also be workplaces like their...
The Iron Grip of the CFA Franc
What is wrong with Africa? Of the world’s twenty-five poorest countries, twenty-one lie south of the Sahara. Crowded streets and informal markets from Dakar to Mombasa...
Beyond the Betrayal
On the morning of August 4, 1944, everything seemed normal at Prinsengracht 263, a tall, narrow building along a canal in Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighborhood. On the...
A Fable of Agency
In The Allure of the Archives (1989), a gem of a book, the French historian Arlette Farge talks about unearthing, insofar as it’s possible, a past...
Schemes Gone Awry
When Richard Wilbur undertook in 1952 to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope, it was as compensation for his inability (despite having received a grant for the purpose)...
How Do Whispers Become Movements?
The most thrilling part of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), John Reed’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, is not the storming of...
Shadows Across the Decades
Some way through Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy, the novel’s narrator—an accomplished writer in middle age called Francisco Goldberg, whose name isn’t his only resemblance to the...
