Continental Drift
The European Union is a grand act of forgetting, but, in the novels of Ágota Kristóf, the violence of Europe's past keeps coming back to the surface
No Man’s Land
Lying outside either state’s claims to sovereignty, the border zone both challenges and defines the legal conception of the state.
As Goes Naples
The disastrous, corrupt "recovery" of war-shattered Naples in Curzio Malaparte's The Skin reflects the rot at the core of the European peace
Total Information Awareness
The NSA's recent history shows that PRISM is hardly an aberration, but rather the most recent program in the state's continuous search for total knowledge capture
Scenes Resembling Civil War
Before there was the cancer of Occupy, there were the German Autonomen, street-fighting anarchists who battled riot police through the 80s. A new translation of Fire and Flames, a history of the struggle, shines a light on this proto-Black Bloc.
Revolutionary Laughter
Beyond Cossery's stylish ironies, we glimpse a country seething in poverty and malfeasance and, like the concrete buildings his narratives are usually set in, perpetually on the verge of collapse. In fact, it is seems as if only the totality of this corruption is keeping the country together, an adhesive of turpitude permeating every social