Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train Keeps on Rollin’
Certain books make you dream; Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train wakes you up to the blunt fact that you are alive and living in an ever-rollin’ mythology.
walter benjamin
C. D. Rose’s ‘Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea’ Plays Familiar Games with Time
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea plays with postmodernism, autofiction, philosophy, and a short story canon peopled by writers from Augustine to Raymond Carver.
Art Historian Dora Apel Queries What We Choose to Remember
In Calling Memory into Place, art historian and cultural critic Dora Apel explores the relationship between collective and personal memory and place in a series of reflective essays that are by turns erudite and personal.
Why Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron’ Can Help Guide Us Through COVID-19
Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.
Patti Smith Is Some Messed Up Kind of Saint
Perhaps what Smith's Devotion teaches us most easily is the virtue of hubris.
Franz Hessel’s ‘ Reprinted Walking in Berlin’ Celebrates the Observant Urban Stroller
Reading Walking in Berlin is the next best thing to traveling back in time to visit the capital of the Weimar Republic as it was in 1929.