My Year Of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, is the story of an unnamed recent art history graduate in mid twenties. Place: New York. Time: 2000/2001. Plot: The heroine decides to sleep her life away, or at least a year of it, a feat she tries to achieve DIY-style with a… 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
Editor’s note: In reaction to a recently published article by Ariane Veiergang and Ditte Nesdam-Madsen on their most recent project Terrapolis, ark review received an email, signed by one Schrödinger’s cat, containing a strange piece of writing. After some deliberation, the decision was made to publish the text in its entirety, although there was a… Keep Reading
Pogranicze is a Polish word that means borderland: an area along the border. Borderlands are mosaics of diverse forces—of numerous possibilities and exciting encounters, but also areas of dangerous frictions and painful tensions. Places of some peculiar energy, which can take many forms. Fundacja Pogranicze [The Borderland Foundation] and its sister organisation Ośrodek Pogranicze—sztuk, kultur,… Keep Reading
One dimension of these times in which we live, the times of post-truth, is that they are troubled by an epidemic of fake news. The “fake” infuses the public debate of which we are a part of, whether we like it or not. This very specific condition can be, and indeed is, met with a… Keep Reading
Only last night did I read the following—‘He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow. We didn’t know the writer. And nor did our literature teacher.’—and today I woke up to see the snow here, covering the roofs of the buildings vis a vis mine.… Keep Reading
I When we were very young, in 1990, a brilliant Polish translator named Stanislaw Barańczak wrote this brilliant essay about translation. Paradoxically, the text itself resists translation, that is, unless one is prepared to follow a rather twisted scenario worthy of a Borgesian imagination. Untranslated, the essay remains largely unknown abroad and even in Poland… Keep Reading
This month there is a bonus episode of the Ark Audio Book Club podcast on David Foster Wallace’s epic of tennis, drug addiction and TV. In preparation for that, the panel has written four short reviews of this very long book, ranging from the very favourable to the sycophantically fawning. Franek (Press play before you… Keep Reading
In 2016, the poet, rapper, spoken-word artist and dramatist Kate Tempest published her debut novel The Bricks that Built the Houses. In many ways, it is a book about ‘all that is meaningless’: There is alcohol, drugs and nights out, there is desperation form trying to make meets end, and finally, there is this peculiar… Keep Reading
Ark volunteers pick and present their worst reads of 2017. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to call this my worst read of 2017. This novel has, after all, won the Man Booker Prize. However, having read several Man Booker Prize winners over the years, I couldn’t help but… Keep Reading