Radicalism
Story Stream
Anarchy in the U.S.A. October 28, 2022
In an era when dissent and unpopular opinions are as likely to be suppressed by moralizing “liberals” (sic) as they are by censorious “conservatives,” it’s instructive to recall a period in American history when things were quite different. It was th...
Is Alejandro Zambra a Genius? October 27, 2022
With his 2006 prose debut Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra was instantly named a writer to watch in his native Chile, a literary representative of the first generation to come of age under democracy. Eighteen years and many accolades later, his early experim...
When Reason Fails October 26, 2022
What we have instead of the mass-shooting novel is the mass-shooting essay. Mass-shooting essays, classically, are full of solutions. They work in a fairly simple way: you pluck out a single, overriding factor that causes these events, and then you s...
Prisoner of Love October 19, 2022
Like me, Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) may very well have conflated radical freedom with a lovelorn existence. In his 2008 novel Hugs and Cuddles, recently translated into English by Edgar Garbelotto, love offers a man the tantalizi...
Being Funny in a Foreign Language October 17, 2022
Beneath the 1975’s brilliant sheen lies a sense of doom. Look around you—can’t you sense it, too? Millions of us scrolling through social media with glazed eyes and fragile psyches, unable to find connection beyond the confines of our bedrooms, snort...
Is Hemingway's Paris Lifestyle Still Possible? October 17, 2022
If you were asked to picture life as an expatriate in Paris, your mind is likely to drift to one of two images, at once similar and radically different. The first is literary squalor — the starving artist — as depicted in books such as George Orwell’...
Reality Is Wild and on the Wing October 11, 2022
Marguerite Young is known primarily for a mammoth novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a hallucinatory picaresque featuring an ensemble of eccentric characters, and for two novelistic historical studies: Angel in the Forest (1945), about the Uto...
