Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rakos

- | 3
With the species developing a real knack for atrocity, I turn to books not so much in search of escape but for reassurance.
- | 3
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rákoš

- | 8
Turns out there’s not much you can do for second-degree paraffin burns beyond trying to cool them down, keep them clean, and try not to pop the blisters.
- | 8
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Essays

The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

- | 4
To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemporary literature’s most sophisticated exponents of the sacred.
- | 4
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rákoš

- | 8
We read and write for largely the same principal reason the ancients did: because, good Lord, we’re a damn mess. If 2016 hasn’t convinced you, I’m not sure what it will take.
- | 8
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Reviews

Composed of Living Breath: On Svetlana Alexievich’s ‘Secondhand Time’

- | 2
Alexievich takes the jingoish caricature, the pulp-fiction rogue, the faceless millions of victims of historical record, and restores to them a voice -- their own.
- | 2
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The Millions Interview

Svetlana Alexievich Is No Useful Idiot

- | 6
The idea of real, substantive equality is eternal. It’s beautiful. But somehow, in the Russian application of it, it always ends in a river of blood.
- | 6
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In Person

Ambrose Akinmusire and Jazz in the Smoldering City: A Dispatch From Kyiv

- | 4
Whatever they may have expected, what the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet got was a night onstage before this cloud of witnesses. An otherwise unimaginable crowd in a country in the grip of a rumored war stopping to listen to a black man from Oakland and his band testify while the city burns away its edges.
- | 4
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In Person

Tend to the Wounded: Dispatches from Kyiv

- | 5
This is the first time I’ve been in a hot war zone, and the only thing I’ve learned is that I’m too old for this shit.
- | 5
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