"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
Lewis Mumford never finished a degree, which is one of the main reasons I am attracted to his work: after chronic illness interrupted his studies at the City College of New York, what became one of the twentieth century's most complete bodies of critical thinking...
Christopher Alexander was born in Vienna in 1936, to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, and left with his family for England after the Anschluss in March 1938 (which is a fancy name for when Hitler annexed unwilling Austria to Germany). He read mathematics...
We're closing out the month a little differently than we opened it, and we're circling back to the city since many of you will be doing just that. What's left of August won't be organised into weekly themes with a Wednesday essay tying them together:...
We already encountered W.G. Sebald with his The Rings of Saturn, and today I'd like to bring you his last novel, Austerlitz, published in 2001. The story follows a man named Jacques Austerlitz while he slowly uncovers the truth about his origins and his traumatic...
Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator, born in 1923 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 for poetry marked by a sharp, ironic awareness of human life and history. Map: Collected and Last Poems is an English-language volume of Szymborska’s work,...
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist, essayist, poet, and translator who became the first woman elected to the Académie française in 1980. No, I'm not kidding. Her full name was Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour; “Yourcenar” began as a pen...
Anne Michaels is a Toronto‑based Canadian writer who first gained attention as a poet before becoming internationally recognised for her fiction. Her writing is poetic and meditative, blending philosophical reflection on history, trauma, and ethics, and she's best known for her debut novel Fugitive Pieces...
Born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria in 1863, the poet known as C.P. Cavafy is regarded as the greatest modern Greek poet, though he spent much of his life in the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria. He wrote only about 200 poems, many of them published...
Zbigniew Herbert was a major 20th-century Polish poet, essayist, and dramatist, born in Lviv in 1924 and associated with a strong moral, anti-totalitarian voice in postwar Polish literature. Report from the Besieged City is one of his best-known poems, first published in English in the...
These last six days have been about materiality: one object, one specific made or found thing, and its exact physical fact being conflated with everything that's accumulated on top of that fact through use, culture, or attention. A crate. A furrow. A toad in an...
