A wide-ranging conversation among 3 authors across 2 languages, touching upon poetics and politics, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, and more.
Kirsten Greenidge is the Village Voice/Obie award-winning author of Milk Like Sugar and The Luck of the Irish, as well as the plays Little Row Boat; or, Conjecture, Our Duaghters,…
I met Madison Smartt Bell on the veranda of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince in 1997 during a summer of communications work for Haiti’s Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. At the time,…
Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit,…
“Auschwitz begins when one looks at a slaughterhouse and says, ‘they’re only animals’.” This quote is attributed to Theodor W. Adorno. Except he never said it. Despite this, at least…
In an 1886 addendum to The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “today I find it an impossible book—badly written, clumsy, and embarrassing.” The book,…
I picked up Checkhov’s story “The Kiss” as an undergraduate who had never read a Russian author. The story has a fairly simple plot: along with his artillery brigade, Staff-Captain…
In October ’72 my ten-year-old daughter, Veronica, and I attempted to fly from Kathmandu to Lukla for the Khumbu trek to Thangyboche monastery, which lies at over 12,600 ft., across…
Jokes never mean only one thing, and the hidden story of political humour under Stalin is far more nuanced than a simple struggle between repression and resistance.