Paris in March
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March was moody as hell. True to form: bright sunshine one minute, freezing rain the next. And I'm not just talking about the weather. I'm done with it, honestly. Good riddance. April better bring some stability.
Read MoreMarch 2024
No Man Nor God – William Giraldi
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"The wolves wanted a story woven from truth, not myth. A story without terror." December in Alaska. Cold. Dark. Hungry. In a rare event, wolves attack a village. A man's daughter vanishes. What follows is a brutal hunt through frozen wilderness where survival demands everything.
Read MorePoetry Spring 2024 /3
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Last day of Poetry Spring 2024, but the poetic insurrection keeps going. It has to. We're never done fighting - against society, against others, against ourselves. This year's theme hits different.
Read MoreMaking Love - Jean-Philippe Toussaint
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"Dawn broke, and I knew our love was done. I watched it unravel before me, dissolving with the night, moving at the near-still pace of time when you're really paying attention." Contrary to what the title suggests, this isn't about sex. It's about watching love die in real time.
Read MorePoetry Spring 2024 /2
Hope. I anchored hope to the roots of life. Against the darkness, I raised lights. Planted torches at the edge of night. Lights that persist, torches that slip between shadows and barbarism. Lights that are reborn.
Read MoreThe Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner
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"Speed is a passage between life and death, and at the end, you hope to emerge on life's side." Reno gets her name from the Nevada city where she grew up. Raised among boys, she developed a taste for speed early - on dirt tracks, on motorcycles, always pushing the edge.
Read MoreThe Principle - Jérôme Ferrari
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"What makes up the substance of the world is not material." 1932: a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg wins the Nobel Prize for laying the groundwork for quantum mechanics. Sixty years later, a philosophy student in Corsica grapples with Heisenberg's legacy and the moral weight of scientific discovery.
Read MoreShark - Bertrand Belin
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"Caution feeds on curiosity and appetite, cannibalizing the spirit of anyone living in fear and self-restraint. It can only produce a fake existence, an existence like a greenhouse endive - pale, tasteless."
Read MorePoetry Spring 2024
Today marks the opening of the 17th Poetry Spring festival, sponsored by Jacques Bonnaffé, themed "The Poetic Insurrection." I'm all in on this theme. The Cage. Hamsters, wake up. The straw awaits you, there in the corner.
Read MoreAmericanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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"I didn't feel Black myself. I only became Black when I arrived in America." Americanah is what Nigerians call their compatriots who return home after years in the States. That's what Ifemelu is. After fifteen years in America, she's going back to Lagos, carrying everything she learned about race, identity, and belonging.
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