A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

An excerpt from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

The small body of prose by Galician Jewish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz that was published between 1934 and 1938 has entered into, transformed, and enriched Polish, Jewish, and Central European modernisms, stretching the boundaries of how each of these bodies of modern literature is understood. It has also ...
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A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...
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Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

Sukatani, a punk band from Central Java, are known for critiquing the interconnected violence of police, military, and religious institutions. I like to play their music in my Minneapolis house—and share it on my Instagram—to protest the return of fascism in Indonesia and globally. So early this year, I was ...
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The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...
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Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Writing Was Always Magical

On Literary Theory for Robots and divining the text of the future

Rather than focus on techno-utopian fantasies or doomsday predictions in which technology replaces humans, scholar Dennis Yi Tenen inspects writing itself as a human technology. In his new book, Literary Theory for Robots (W. W. Norton, 2024), the English professor and former Microsoft engineer asks: How will AI change the ...
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Writing Was Always Magical

The Monster Became My Companion

A conversation on Cyborg Fever, the cold stream of data, and why entropy wins out

Any book worth reading will refuse to be paraphrased. So it goes with Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025). Even the truncated plot summary, rich as it is—a young orphan falls into a coma when his beloved nun suddenly stops speaking to him, and in the ...
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The Monster Became My Companion

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...
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God Bless Perverts

Blurb Me

Promotion uber alles in Ada Calhoun’s Crush

Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A ...
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Blurb Me

Can Poetry Still Unite Us?

An interview with Sarah V. Schweig on her new poetry collection The Ocean in the Next Room

For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has always been a question of looking for the most truthful way to record things that had seemed otherwise inscrutable or difficult to understand. Her new collection, The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels back the noise of daily life to ...
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Can Poetry Still Unite Us?

The Blue House

An excerpt from The Ocean in the Next Room

I'm still here in the city I entered years ago.I've been in the city all this time.I don't look up and around much anymore.I've been studying philosophy and having a sonand killing time. I follow my son from roomto room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,I kill a roach ...
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The Blue House