The Siskin Literary Review

08/29/2020

https://newrepublic.com/article/158973/everyday-inspiration-anna-karenina

Did distractions, disruptions, and gossip shape Tolstoy’s novel as much as long-simmering ideas about morality and desire?

08/28/2020

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-alternative-common-sense-notes-on-carlo-michelstaedters-philosophy/

Dylan J. Montanari parses “The Wreckage of Philosophy,” the new book by Mimmo Cangiano on Carlo Michelstaedter’s thought.

08/28/2020

https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-why-we-hoard-when-we-store-and-who-collects

Whether collecting, storing or hoarding, we’ve always had our issues with stuff – not least deciding what’s worth having

04/17/2020

https://www.1843magazine.com/upfront/brave-new-word/do-you-speak-corona-a-guide-to-covid19-slang

Around the world, coronavirus is changing how we speak. Don’t be a “covidiot” - make sure your pandemic parlance is up to scratch

03/25/2020

#1790

A Journey Around My Room was written in 1790 by a young French officer named Xavier de Maistre, who had found himself in some trouble over a duel (illegal) and was sentenced to house arrest. (I rea…

03/10/2020

The spread of the Covid-19 virus has triggered an epidemic of advice. This advice is important, but it seems destined to make our lives more miserable and isolated. However, there is an unusual source of counsel which offers another way to deal with an epidemic. That source is the Decameron. The Ita...

11/22/2019

Gilgamesh is decidedly remote from our world and time. Uruk, the Mesopotamian city near the fertile banks of the Euphrates, where the poem’s action begins and ends, is one of the earliest cities in…

11/19/2019

Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those …

10/25/2019

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/rips_nicolaia_21_october_2019.php

The dark and white flours of ideology

10/25/2019

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4460-there-is-always-in-history-this-possibility-of-the-unexpected-interview-with-carlo-ginzburg
Verso Books

Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Cheese and the Worms, is one of Europe's most influential historians. In this interview with Claire Zalc, Ginzburg discusses the influence of his parents - the novelist Natalia Ginzburg and scholar of Russian literature Leone Ginzburg - his childhood in Fascist Italy, h...

10/25/2019

This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it does and does not mean in its context. Auden...