So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson In the last year or so, as we spend more time online, we have been seeing cases of people getting so-called “canceled”. They said or did something inappropriate, well maybe just flat out racist, ableist, transphobic, xenophobic, homophobic, etc. I, like many others, have been debating my… Keep Reading
Happening by Annie Ernaux This (past) year, I went from having read zero books by Annie Ernaux to having read like three or four in just one month. Happening was by far the most impressive one, which is probably a weird thing to say about a harrowing piece dealing with abortion. The topic is, to… Keep Reading
Everything Except for Females by Andrea Long Chu Perhaps it’s slightly unfair to consign all but one book I read in 2020 to the category of ‘worst read’, but 2020 feels like it’s been unfair, and I’m writing from day 11 of a 14-day quarantine, so there. My 2020, and I’m sure the 2020s of… Keep Reading
The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop If this unbelievable year brought something good it’s that I finally found the time to read more books than usual and, luckily, many were really good ones. Of all them, one that will always remain with me is The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop. As my 96 -year -old friend Ulla… Keep Reading
Earlier this year we had the opportunity to host a reading/performance by New York-based writer and performer J. P. Slote of extracts from three plays from the recently published collection Loretta Auditorium Presents The Body of Loretta from Fly by Night press. The collection marks the culmination of more than 20 years of work in… Keep Reading
The End of Alice by A. M. Homes There is a much better novel hiding in The End of Alice than the one A.M. Homes provided. That novel would be about a young woman trying to imagine herself into the desires of a pedophile as a way to escape the boredom of world limited and… Keep Reading
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner There are novels that you read and as you read them you think to yourself, “this is a good novel”. You finish them and put them down and maybe take a little bit of the experience with you or maybe not. Then there are novels by Ben Lerner. Lerner… Keep Reading
ROFL: Reading On the Floor Laughing Umberto Eco – Travels in Hyperreality I recently came across an essay by Umberto Eco entitled Travels in Hyperreality from 1975. It is the fruit of Eco’s visit to America, a hyperreal land, as he claims, the hyperreality of which he sets out to grasp. Eco visits Disneyland—of… Keep Reading
BMS (2016 – ) is a collective of writers and an acronym for blod, måne, søndag (blood, moon, Sunday). Knoglemarv lavendel is their debut poetry collection. This is a collective translation and interpretation of three poems from Knoglemarv lavendel. This excerpt from Knoglemarv lavendel is published by permission of Arena and ©… Keep Reading
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada Each sentence of this book made me what to scream, owing to how aware reading each of them made me of the brute fact that I too, someday, would die never to return. The time that I spent reading this self-important book denied me even the possibility… Keep Reading