The European Review of Books -

The sea between

Jamie Mackay

« In order to survive amidst this bleak existence, the Mediterranean people established two distinct strategies: hopelessness or salvation. Some embraced hopelessness as the best way to approach the absurd condition of human life. »

Reviews

Welcome to the European Review of Books

What is the European Review of Books? A primer, if you are here for the first time.

FROM THE EDITORS

The Passion of strangers: a philosophy of friendship

Marina Garcés

Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented.

Essays
A letter from

Ece Temelkuran

« Even if you feel at home in time and space today, you know that you are already in mourning for the future loss of everything that is beautiful. This is the first time humanity is mourning in the future tense. »

Pearls
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow

Oksana Forostyna

Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.

Reviews

MORE

The West’s West and the rest’s West

Oksana Forostyna

« To see the West as a process means that France was at one time westernized. Rome was westernized. Greece was westernized »

Reviews
8 hours don’t make a day

Çağla Aribal

A story about the art of disappearance

Stories
Saving the angel

George Prochnik

« This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. »

Essays
On being plagiarizedThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Guido Snel

« To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »

Essays
Open the drawer

Hasan Belal

Visiting his hometown, Tartus, he opened a drawer of old family photographs.

Pearls
What Sweden is, not

Martin Gelin

« Once the most social democratic country in Europe, and then, in the 1990s, the most neoliberal one, Sweden now aims to become the most nationalist one. »

Reviews
« Friendship is revolutionary » — Interview with Marina Garcés

Nuria Ribas Costa

« I think reimagining relationships of distance and proximity is interesting in order to go beyond romantic ideas of neighbors. »

Interview
A woman in Tangiers: against erasure

Ines Weizman

« I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse. »

Pearls
The political life of dreams

Christy Wampole

« Dreams could show an internalization of oppression just as easily as a resistance to oppression — which would mean a dream isn’t so free a realm after all. »

Reviews
Can AI have a headache?

Sander Pleij

« This summer my inner warrior was kissed back alive by an unlikely figure: the Pope. »

Reviews

Black on white, with a glint of copper. And inside: the Mediterranean as a sea between; dreams, and their political life; headaches — human, divine, and artificial. A woman steps in Tangiers; looted libraries whisper their afterlives; strangers write to strangers. What Sweden isn’t; Yugoslav tales of literary theft ascending; an angel is saved — or not — in a broken geography. Eight hours that don’t make a day, and the question of what the West means to the rest.

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Issue Ten

TOP PEARLS

~ Potpourri: Paris

Sander Pleij

~ Potpourri: Florence

Sander Pleij

~ Potpourri: Spain

Lucas Villavecchia

~ Potpourri: France

Fernanda Eberstadt

~ Potpourri: Malta

Clare Azzopardi

TIMELESS FROM THE LIBRARY

Babushka Z CosplayThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Mattia Salvia

A Ukrainian great-grandmother inadvertently becomes a pro-Russian icon.

Pearls
The plant whisperers

Kapka Kassabova

If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.

Essays
Carry The Prophet in your coat pocketThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri

When you’re fifteen and you read Kahlil Gibran’s mystical bestseller for the first time.

Essays
Glory to the railsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Oksana Forostyna

Millions of Ukrainians left the country during the first weeks of the invasion; four million were evacuated by train, including a million children. Thousands of…

Reviews
Child KingsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Marek Maj

« Time is a child playing draughts; the kingship is a child’s. »

Pearls
Fables of wickedness for a liquid Europe

Gonçalo Tavares

A story about traps

Stories
Of trotting horses & angelic wordsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Marisa Libbon

I was reminded of Muybridge’s moving pictures while looking at the serial attempts of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348/49) at rendering the invisible visible.

Pearls
Talk Proto-Indo-European to me, darling

Ed Simon

*wīrós (man), *h₁ék̂wōs (horse), *gwéneh₂ (woman)

Reviews
Queen of the nightThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

Alexander Faludy

Maria Theresa, Habsburg empress, created the modern European state. To ponder her reign is to ask what the Enlightenment was — and is. Be careful…

Reviews

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Issue Ten