Tag
Europe
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
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Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Waldman’s Nate Piven is a writer in the New York of the very recent past, after the city’s center of literary gravity slid across the…
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Unreliable Voices From Europe
The first sentence of the Slovakian writer Balla’s “Before the Breakup,” the opening story in Best European Fiction 2013, goes like this: “Miša discovered there was something in the apartment.” The narrator never describes the something, but it is ominous, attentive, and located behind the television. It is also associated with Miša’s growing unease about…
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A Conversation with Ellis Avery
Set in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude is inspired by the Russo-Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young woman who modeled for her most famous painting, Beautiful Rafaela. De Lempicka met Rafaela on a walk in the Bois de Boulogne and drove her back to the studio: the two women became lovers,…
