The European Review of Books

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The European Review of Books

Read it twice. A magazine of culture and ideas, from many Europes and many languages.

05/03/2025

In the '60s and '70s, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a few brilliant Yiddish gangster novels set in Warsaw’s pre-war Krochmalna Street. They were recently re-discovered and published in many languages – except English. Maddalena Vaglio Tanet investigates why Singer's English translations remain locked away in a Texas archive.

Read more by signing up via the link: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-underbelly-of-krochmalna-street

28/02/2025

"Cow is sick, but doesn’t know in which stomach."

Jan van Tienen’s essay traces European news satire in the tradition of The Onion, exploring how every country seems to have its own version. But can satire resonate across borders? Maybe a true European Union needs a shared sense of humor.

Read this article and others by signing up via the link. Now in front of the paywall: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/funny-haha

19/02/2025

A bleakly hilarious essay on European news satire: "Europe! Just a continent full of people who apparently laugh at things that few others can understand," Jan van Tienen observes.

On European versions of The Onion, satire summits, and jokes lost in translation: Read the essay → https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/funny-haha/

17/02/2025

Last November, we were invited by Princeton University to come and speak about our misadventures in magazine making – the joys, struggles and absurdities of starting the European Review of Books. We shared some big questions, some practical lessons, and a few cautionary tales.

Here is our founding editor George Blaustein introducing the concept. In the following weeks, we'll have more snippets from that talk for you.

13/02/2025

Now free to read: Wiegertje Postma reviews a brilliant new book on the history of pregnancy research—its risks, unhinged experiments, and overlooked women—alongside three novels exploring the personal experience of pregnancy and birth.

Read it here: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-business-of-men/

07/02/2025

Each issue of ERB features interviews by founding editor Sander Pleij, using the medium of texting to create dynamic and engaging conversations. In this edition, he speaks with Kamil Ahsan—an environmental historian at Yale, essayist, critic, and the founding editor of SAAG (South Asian Avant-Garde), a magazine and website dedicated to publishing radical, dissident, and experimental writing from South Asia and beyond.

Read the conversation by following the link: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/texting-with-kamil-ahsan/

05/02/2025

With Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner has crafted a richly plotted spy story about philosophers, communards & Neanderthals, all while exploring Europe's crisis—its fading cultural glory & struggle to mimic American capitalism. Harilaos Stecopoulos reviews it in Issue Seven of The European Review of Fading Cultural Glory.

Read the full review and sign up to explore other articles free for a week via the link: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/neanderthal-aesthetics

31/01/2025

Issue 7 has been spotted at Athenaeum Boekhandel in Amsterdam and is waiting for you in bookstores around the world! Filled to the brim with delights: European news satire, the Chinese Communist Party’s favorite sci-fi series, fiction by Alba de Céspedes and Sergei Lebedev, reviews of novels by Olga Tokarczuk and Rachel Kushner, Yiddish gangster novels, anti-apartheid country music, hard-boiled Bulgarian horsemen, and much more—all in a bafflingly beautiful design.

If you can’t find it at your local bookstore, you can order your copy directly from our shop by following this link:

https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/product/issue-seven/.

Where will you be picking up yours?

27/01/2025

In Issue Seven, Madeline Gressel delves into The Empusium, the latest novel by Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Drawing comparisons to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk’s eerie sanatorium tale is narrated by a mysterious, animistic “We” and features a vibrant cast debating life’s biggest questions. Gressel explores the novel’s lively characters, engaging story, and the way Tokarczuk undermines her own narrative setup.

Read the full review and sign up to explore other essays free for a week via the link: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/something-rotten/

22/01/2025

Among the victims of the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, were 70 Thai farmworkers. This starkly highlights the fact that Israeli farms rely heavily on Thai migrants – in contrast with modern Zionism's founding ideals, in which diaspora Jews worked the land.

The anthropologist Matan Kaminer discusses the « hyper-exploitation » of Thai workers in his book Capitalist Colonial, in which he shares insights from six months spent as a farmhand on a moshav in the Central Arabah, a region where the Thai population has equaled the Israeli population since the 1990s.

Read Fernanda Eberstadt’s interview with Kaminer about the new cultural dynamics between Thai migrants and their Israeli employers, by subscribing to the ERB or by signing up for our free newsletter.

Find the article here:
https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/tham-dii-day-dii-thai-farmworkers-in-israel/

20/01/2025

Issue 7 is waiting for you in bookstores around the world. Here, you can see it at the H'ART Museum Shop in Amsterdam. Explore the latest essays, stories, and ideas in a breathtakingly beautiful design.

Where will you pick up your copy?

Can't find it in your local bookshop? Order Issue 7 here:
https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/product/issue-seven/

17/01/2025

Sergei Lebedev’s The Lady of the Mine (2025) unfolds in a Ukrainian coal-mining town, where the past lies buried—until one day, corpses rain from the sky after a jetliner is shot down.

Read an excerpt by following the link:

https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-body-in-the-crushed-roses/

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