roughghosts

When noted Albanian author Lekë Cukali arrives in Sarajevo for a writer’s residency, he is met by an elegant but odd woman, his programme contact, who accompanies him to the flat where he is to stay for the next month.

Imagine the sight: on a foggy February morning in Milan, the modest and apologetic narrator of the title story of this long overdue translation of short fiction by the enigmatic Argentinian writer Ángel Bonomini (1929–1994), is surprised to see two elepha…

Burn.

Jean Echenoz opens his tribute to his longtime editor and publisher, with an account that many other hopeful, and perhaps naïve, would-be authors might know well.

By the wine-press house, the road turns offto the right, I see low village roofs through the mountains, on roads burnished blue,I’m a stranger here, for I intrude no one in sight, only acacias, vineyardssand-built houses beneath antennas between wine cell…

What is a mother?

Sharp and unsentimental, the prose of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen crackles across the page, exposing the painful insecurities of ordinary people as they navigate the often messy experiences of life—housewives who question their marriages, children who wo…

The striking title of this far-ranging intellectual and artistic collaboration between Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer comes from Hölderlin’s unconventional translations of the Pindar Fragments: The lonely school’s capacity for the world.

I have been staring at Barrie Cooke’s pencil sketch for a month, sucked into the mesh of scribbled lines whirling between two figures in a boat, hauling in a curved fish in a net.

The stamps on the envelope were still moist.

I think, it doesn’t matter where I am, whether calm or with nerves shot to pieces, in the mountains, in towns, sleeping well or sleeping badly, it doesn’t matter, I am quite lost, wherever I am.

Colette’s The Pure and the Impure opens in an opium den in Paris sometime during what would come to be known, looking back through the veils of nostalgia, as the Belle Époque.

There are very few things that man needs: to love, to be happy, to eat; and then he dies.

Toronto consists of enclaves.

Father Luis Cordoba was a large man, and his heart even larger—too large, in fact.