"I got lucky meeting art because psychologically, I had everything needed to become a terrorist." That's Niki de Saint-Phalle talking. In 2022, I hit up the massive retrospective at the Grand Palais dedicated to her work. This book connects to that electric creative energy...
The Wheel spins: birth to death to rebirth, always through pain. From the bloody hands of midwives to the bony shoulders of gravediggers, toward earth or fire. Enard captures this cyclical brutality with unflinching clarity...
"China exists beyond dreams. Beyond reality. It's a simulation of both." May 2024: Alexandre Labruffe gets offered a cultural attaché position in a Chinese city most of us hadn't heard of yet—Wuhan. Then everything changed...
"Not to brag, but I'm exceptionally gifted at turning a life that should be happy into genuine hell. And nobody gets to dismiss that hell lightly—it's real, terrifyingly real." First time reading Carrère. His raw honesty cuts deep...
"Hyper-capitalism is war. Multiple fronts, battles, casualties—a calm march toward oblivion." Imagine: what if in 2025, the international community actually grasped the danger humanity faced? Ducrozet imagines that alternate path...
"Adventure is more than interrupting routine or journeying to exotic unknowns—it's a disposition toward existing in time." A mother. Her son. She struggles with a brutal breakup. He watches. They navigate forward together...
"She says he has the gift of survival. Her? Barely the gift of life." They fled fast—a collapsing world, a pandemic both sudden and vicious. Years later, they live on a mountainside between cliffs and forest in their sanctuary...
"Will stiffens everything—don't want anything clearly, but position yourself to obtain everything, almost with eyes closed. Surrender. Trust yourself. The most beautiful things always happen naturally." Reinhardt nails this paradox...
"After electricity, early vaccines, atomic energy, personal computers—the vanguard of Progress now blossomed between the legs of what some still dared call a sex toy." Despite getting bored with his previous work, I took a chance...
"If we can't believe a story just because it's beautiful, what's the point of this profession?" Four men climb the Alps hunting a dragon trapped in ice. Three are paleontologists, one is something else entirely...