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Monday April 19, 2021
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Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »
April 19, 2021

Articles of Note

Denis Donoghue, a literary critic who opposed politicized theorizing and traditionalist pieties, is dead at 92 ... more »


New Books

A new biography of Faulkner is “among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist” ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look?  ... more »


April 17, 2021

Articles of Note

The absurdity of college admissions. Deluged with applications, some colleges are presuming to analyze applicants’ souls... more »


New Books

Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing... more »


Essays & Opinions

A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »


April 16, 2021

Articles of Note

Sam Sifton wants home cooking to be more like jazz: out with recipes, in with improvisation. Is that a good idea for all of us?... more »


New Books

The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point?... more »


Essays & Opinions

If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »


April 15, 2021

Articles of Note

Merve Emre: "One of the most frustrating things about so much of literary criticism today... is that there's the sense that you have to pick your methodological camp"  ... more »


New Books

Traversing the internet, Patricia Lockwood finds a surfeit of self-righteousness recorded for posterity  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up  ... more »


April 14, 2021

Articles of Note

Baudelaire gave us not only the flaneur but also the convalescent: the addled thinker driven by feverish curiosity... more »


New Books

The tragedy of Edward Said: By his life’s end, the causes for which he fought had been defeated... more »


Essays & Opinions

John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change”   ... more »


April 13, 2021

Articles of Note

The magic of fusion. If the technology works, the hydrocarbons that established society as we know it will be replaced with clean power... more »


New Books

Thorstein Veblen’s reputation for adultery has been exaggerated. But his relations with women did affect his career... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration"   ... more »


April 12, 2021

Articles of Note

To stand in front of a Brutalist building is to be humbled, "confronted by a chunk of eternity. That can be comforting — or disconcerting"  ... more »


New Books

Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward?  ... more »


April 10, 2021

Articles of Note

A film maudit, French for a cursed film, is one that is widely panned but staunchly defended by a devoted few ... more »


New Books

Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists  ... more »


April 9, 2021

Articles of Note

In 2002, Maya Angelou set out to master the two-sentence epigram. She had a deal with Hallmark    ... more »


New Books

The New Journalism style long ago gave way to the cult of the personal essay. Rachel Kushner is bringing it back  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure  ... more »


April 8, 2021

Articles of Note

“About 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses": Philip Roth's Czech KGB file... more »


New Books

Consider the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book on dictators elides the political and cultural conditions that allow for their rise   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »


April 7, 2021

Articles of Note

Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, has died. He published works no one else would publish, from the edges of American life  ... more »


New Books

Stephen Hawking’s elusive character, revealed: self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida  ... more »


April 6, 2021

Articles of Note

We used to fear unpredictable robots we could not restrain. Now we worry about using machines to restrain unpredictable humans... more »


New Books

In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »


Essays & Opinions

In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »


April 5, 2021

Articles of Note

Midnight's Children at 40: "For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight"  ... more »


New Books

Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »


Essays & Opinions

Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »


April 3, 2021

Articles of Note

"War to war, wife to wife, novel to novel." Hemingway's most constant mistress, says James Parker, "may have been concussion"  ... more »


New Books

For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not  ... more »


April 2, 2021

Articles of Note

Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, says Katha Pollitt, decades-old children’s books are low on the list ... more »


New Books

The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »


Essays & Opinions

American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign  ... more »


April 1, 2021

Articles of Note

"The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions” ... more »


New Books

Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too  ... more »


March 31, 2021

Articles of Note

Was Foucault abusing children in Tunisia in the late 1960s? A sordid story makes the rounds in Paris  ... more »


New Books

Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough?  ... more »


March 30, 2021

Articles of Note

As early as 1957, Philip Larkin noted, poetry was losing its audience. The situation is worse now. Why don’t readers care?... more »


New Books

Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »


Essays & Opinions

David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »


March 29, 2021

Articles of Note

Paul Theroux at 79. "I was once a hotshot, I was once the punk. And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you're older, and you see the turning of the years as it is"  ... more »


New Books

Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness  ... more »


March 27, 2021

Articles of Note

Can a white person translate a Black poet? A fracas has broken out over identity and the translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”  ... more »


New Books

The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing?   ... more »


March 26, 2021

Articles of Note

The mess at Medium. As the company’s latest “pivot” suggests, billionaires’ whims and sustainable journalism aren’t always compatible   ... more »


New Books

The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away”   ... more »




Articles of Note

Denis Donoghue, a literary critic who opposed politicized theorizing and traditionalist pieties, is dead at 92 ... more »


The absurdity of college admissions. Deluged with applications, some colleges are presuming to analyze applicants’ souls... more »


Sam Sifton wants home cooking to be more like jazz: out with recipes, in with improvisation. Is that a good idea for all of us?... more »


Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Merve Emre: "One of the most frustrating things about so much of literary criticism today... is that there's the sense that you have to pick your methodological camp"  ... more »


Baudelaire gave us not only the flaneur but also the convalescent: the addled thinker driven by feverish curiosity... more »


The magic of fusion. If the technology works, the hydrocarbons that established society as we know it will be replaced with clean power... more »


To stand in front of a Brutalist building is to be humbled, "confronted by a chunk of eternity. That can be comforting — or disconcerting"  ... more »


A film maudit, French for a cursed film, is one that is widely panned but staunchly defended by a devoted few ... more »


In 2002, Maya Angelou set out to master the two-sentence epigram. She had a deal with Hallmark    ... more »


“About 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses": Philip Roth's Czech KGB file... more »


Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, has died. He published works no one else would publish, from the edges of American life  ... more »


We used to fear unpredictable robots we could not restrain. Now we worry about using machines to restrain unpredictable humans... more »


Midnight's Children at 40: "For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight"  ... more »


"War to war, wife to wife, novel to novel." Hemingway's most constant mistress, says James Parker, "may have been concussion"  ... more »


Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, says Katha Pollitt, decades-old children’s books are low on the list ... more »


"The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions” ... more »


Was Foucault abusing children in Tunisia in the late 1960s? A sordid story makes the rounds in Paris  ... more »


As early as 1957, Philip Larkin noted, poetry was losing its audience. The situation is worse now. Why don’t readers care?... more »


Paul Theroux at 79. "I was once a hotshot, I was once the punk. And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you're older, and you see the turning of the years as it is"  ... more »


Can a white person translate a Black poet? A fracas has broken out over identity and the translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”  ... more »


The mess at Medium. As the company’s latest “pivot” suggests, billionaires’ whims and sustainable journalism aren’t always compatible   ... more »


Falsification promises to help us separate science from pseudoscience. Only one problem: it doesn't work very well  ... more »


The cadaver known as Harriet Cole — a representation of the nervous system — is a product of anatomical bravado. But where did Harriet come from?... more »


Forget traditional majors — the humanities should organize itself around modules like Social Justice, Migration Studies, and The Problem of God   ... more »


The handshake, past and future. The gesture is so culturally fundamental that something important will be lost if it disappears  ... more »


Edward Said’s Orientalism started a politics of blame that rapidly spread in the academy. He spent decades trying to stanch it  ... more »


Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict. Fear was his creative fuel  ... more »


Jane Cornwell was far more than a typist; she was John le Carré's first editor and indispensable collaborator  ... more »


Jessica Krug, Rachel Dolezal — lefty academics’ identity hoaxing may involve trading mundane traumas for grander narratives of oppression   ... more »


Music unheard and books unread are an affront to our sense of hope and the individualistic tenor of our age  ... more »


We remember Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a pioneering feminist, a social reformer. But look closer and you’ll see a Victorian white nationalist   ... more »


In 1883, fragments of the "original" Book of Deuteronomy were declared a fraud. But what if this notorious fake is real?  ... more »


George Saunders is the prince of the M.F.A. age. Key to his literary stardom and his writerly talents is his relatability  ... more »


Daryl Michael Scott, critic of the 1619 project and of Ava DuVernay’s film 13th: “Bad history and worse social science have replaced truth”... more »


The paradox of Orientalism: While Edward Said's book castigated imperialism, it also weakened the anti-imperialist intellectual project... more »


The idea that people on their deathbeds gain a clearer view of what matters has a distinguished philosophical pedigree. That doesn't mean it's true  ... more »


Carl Hart has used heroin regularly for years. “I am an unapologetic drug user,” says the Columbia University psychology professor  ... more »


Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »


Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism  ... more »


Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »


New Books

A new biography of Faulkner is “among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist” ... more »


Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing... more »


The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point?... more »


Traversing the internet, Patricia Lockwood finds a surfeit of self-righteousness recorded for posterity  ... more »


The tragedy of Edward Said: By his life’s end, the causes for which he fought had been defeated... more »


Thorstein Veblen’s reputation for adultery has been exaggerated. But his relations with women did affect his career... more »


Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down  ... more »


Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »


The New Journalism style long ago gave way to the cult of the personal essay. Rachel Kushner is bringing it back  ... more »


Consider the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book on dictators elides the political and cultural conditions that allow for their rise   ... more »


Stephen Hawking’s elusive character, revealed: self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think  ... more »


In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »


Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »


For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »


The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »


Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism  ... more »


Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios  ... more »


Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »


Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design  ... more »


The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »


The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »


What Van Gogh read. "For him, it was not important to physically possess books, but to make them his own."  ... more »


Frantz Fanon has become a near-mythical figure in antiracist discourse. The cost of that achievement: a watering down of his political commitments... more »


As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction   ... more »


If life exists on any of the Milky Way’s other 100 billion planets, Darwinian selection would be at work there, too ... more »


Helen Frankenthaler and the mainstreaming of the avant-garde. In 1950s New York, painting's culture looked like pop culture  ... more »


While autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license, the bar for ethical fiction keeps getting higher and higher  ... more »


Defending Derrida against his critics is easier than defending him against his followers  ... more »


One of Francis Bacon’s lovers burned down his studio; another threw him out of a second story window. For Bacon, pain was indicative of true emotion ... more »


Novels are increasingly autobiographical, which puts reading at the risk of becoming a tiresome test of authenticity  ... more »


Will the pandemic hasten the use of gene-editing technology? Engineering our bodies to resist disease might not sound so radical right now   ... more »


John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald were two men who struggled to make it as writers. Does the connection go deeper?  ... more »


Life is awful, or so said the cynical and perhaps nihilistic Graham Greene. But art — that could at least make life seem worthwhile ... more »


Does the future of postcolonial thought necessitate a return to Indigenous epistemologies, or can at least some modernist ideas be salvaged?   ... more »


Humanists should be skeptical of our increasingly analytical world. Unfortunately, Lev Manovich’s new book is full of gee-whiz-ism   ... more »


A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues”  ... more »


Robin Dunbar’s science of friendship: Human beings can sustain at most 150 acquaintances, of which only five are intimate  ... more »


The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »


High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look?  ... more »


A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »


If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »


Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up  ... more »


John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change”   ... more »


“Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration"   ... more »


George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward?  ... more »


Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists  ... more »


Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure  ... more »


You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »


Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida  ... more »


In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »


Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »


Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not  ... more »


American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign  ... more »


Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too  ... more »


Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough?  ... more »


David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »


Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness  ... more »


“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing?   ... more »


“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away”   ... more »


There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet...  ... more »


Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history”   ... more »


Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »


The birth of the audiobook dates to the 19th century, when Tennyson and Browning recorded poems for phonographs  ... more »


The new literary moralism. Is this frenzy for censure and the expansion of the definition of harm how we’ll correct the inequities of our time?  ... more »


Polymaths are one thing, freaks of intellect quite another. Even reading about these monsters of learning can leave one exhausted  ... more »


From the Aztecs' “divine food” to the 18th-century smoke enema, the history of smoking is odder than typically presented ... more »


A consensus has emerged on the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists: liberals are the villains... more »


Literary studies argues wrong. Because scholars value critical style over substance, academic culture grows misguided  ... more »


Many people are committed to the idea that they’re biologically superior. Does social-science genetics give them scientific cover?   ... more »


Being overshadowed by genius has destroyed many literary careers. For the Canadian critic Robert Fulford, something like the opposite occurred  ... more »


College admissions is one of the few situations in which it’s rich people scrambling for a scarce resource. The result: our insane system of private schools... more »


Liberal and center-left political parties — once champions of the working class — have become home to meritocrats, hence the party of the new aristocracy... more »


When Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood and England, Hardwick decried his infidelity — both to her and to American literature   ... more »


Remember the televangelists? We now have the Instavangelists, hawking a blend of self-care, wellness, astrology, and left-wing politics  ... more »


Lolita’s greatest champion? Véra Nabokov. She saved it from fire and thought to publish it abroad, decrying domestic “strait-laced morality”  ... more »


The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned   ... more »


Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality”  ... more »


Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province  ... more »


We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »


"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it"  ... more »


A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »


Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress  ... more »


Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors   ... more »


Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification?  ... more »


“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman”  ... more »


Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »


In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »


In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust   ... more »


Nota Bene

  • Philosophy of sound
  • Lives of Hitchcock
  • Poetry in the abstract
  • Poirot, the greatest
  • Conversation with Chomsky
  • Woke Andrea Dworkin
  • Do books matter?
  • Dead Christ
  • Art of handwritten letters
  • Who is Elena Ferrante?


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