Three factors hold the Facebook phenomenon together. It promises eternal youth. It offers a virtualised version of Christian faith. It allows us to enter the game of life without taking undue risk.
Read MoreIt is difficult to bid farewell to Gamal al-Ghitani: a friend, an author, a true Cairene who taught us how to read and admire our history, walk in our cities, feel the power of narrative, and stand in awe of its literal and allegorical significations.
Read MoreOn a Sunday morning the trendy district of Cihangir rarely gets going before noon. Today, though, at 6am everyone seems to be up.
Read Moreby Michael Chan “James Joyce’s Method—Regarding the “Stream of Consciousness” “(Jeimuzu Joisu no metōdo “ishiki no nagare” ni tsuite) is an article published in June 1930 in the journal Shi, genjitsu by the author and literary critic Itō Sei (1905-1969), who was also one of a team of three Japanese translators that prepared the first…
Read MoreIt’s a drizzly summer night, and I’m meeting Tracy O’Neill in Manhattan’s East Village to talk about her debut novel, The Hopeful, the story of a figure skater who breaks her back on the cusp of Olympic competition.
Read More“Many people ask me, should we have halted the occupation a lot earlier?” It would seem that Joshua Wong has no regrets. “We could not have stopped the movement,”
Read MoreI find myself here in the rather awkward position of speaking from two different perspectives, one, that of the novelist, the other, that of the critic.
Read MoreIt’s amazing, isn’t it, the number of mythologies which are about the origin of labor, the number of mythological stories that begin with the origin of labor. Genesis, Hesiod, Ovid to take the three most obvious examples that spring to mind.
Read MoreWhat made C. P. Cavafy write some of the most original poetry in the world? I went to Athens in January 2015 to find out. Born in Alexandria on April 29, 1863, Cavafy died there, on the same day seventy years later.
Read MoreIn the used bookstores of Boston in the late 1980s, the Renaissance section always had multiple cheap copies of two books: E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance.
Read MoreAmar Kanwar wants us to see what most of us prefer not to see: destruction and suffering caused by social injustice and violence fuelled by poisonous racist ideologies, political power battles and corporate greed. It’s not that his images are particularly hard to see.
Read MoreI noted a report in The Independent yesterday about comments that the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, had made about what he called Corbynomics. These are, I presume, the policies announced by Jeremy Corbyn nearly two weeks ago.
Read MoreAmber Carpenter’s Indian Buddhist Philosophy presents its reader with an engaging account of the philosophical development of Buddhist thought in India, from its origins in approximately the fifth century BCE to about the eighth century CE.
Read MoreLast week my phone company made me cry. Waiting excitedly for a new phone, I received an email from EE. “We just need a bit more information from you”, they said. “Call us”.
Read MoreNear the beginning of Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel, How Should a Person Be?, the narrator—coyly, “Sheila”—recalls a jilted ex-lover’s composition of “an outline for a play about [her] life—how it would unfold, decade by decade.”
Read MoreMuseums and galleries weren’t always the grand institutions we experience today. Formerly private collections, visible only to the ruling classes, were projected into the lower echelons of society in grand acts of philanthropy.
Read MoreThe imposition of German demands on Greece, without consideration for its democracy, sovereignty or interests, is one of those moments that changes everything.
Read MoreThe lag between surface reading’s gestation in the late 2000s and its critical uptake/interrogation in the early 2010s roughly corresponds to the time between Kenneth W. Warren’s delivering the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2007 and his publication of the book based on those talks in 2011.
Read MoreInstead of page numbers, “The Crocodiles,” a novel by the Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, is marked by 405 numbered, block paragraphs, the whole symmetrically framed by references to Allen Ginsberg.
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