Taming the Inexplicable
The Witness’s potentially subversive message is lost inside a culture of relentless techno-utopianism and its creator’s own hubris
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
A Dark City
An Afro-Russian boy searches for hope and love in the labyrinthine Moscow metro in Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground
Print on Demand
As Palestinian history is erased, its archive becomes a nomadic war machine
Real Human Being
A collection of essays on the work of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter attempts to move toward a future beyond white supremacist narratives of human universality.
Coming to Las Vegas
In Chris Abani's new novel The Secret History of Las Vegas, universality is in the particular and nothing stays where it's supposed to
Future Islands
If this is what our US-China future portends, how can we change it?
Philosophers of Babel
The Dictionary of Untranslatables offers proof that ideas like “democracy,” “revolution,” “politics,” and even “existence” translate easily from County Cork to Kyiv
A Cute Idea
Ryan Trecartin's films defamiliarize contemporary culture without casting explicit judgment
The Quiet Life
Jesse Ball’s new novel, Silence Once Begun, rises above metafiction to read as tragedy
The White Man's Burden
If male artist Chris Burden didn't exist, the New Museum had to invent him
The Art of Cuisine: Mediterranean
A review of A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David New York Review Books Classics, 203 pp., $14.95 In 1939 Elizabeth David, a lord’s…