The Boundary
They should adapt this book into a movie. It’s a dark, gritty crime noir waiting to be made. What makes it more than your average whodunit murder-mystery genre-novel is the context of its setting.
more...Lucy Gasser
Scholar of literary studies and editor of poco. lit.
Postcolonial literatures and Eurocentrism: Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town
Postcolonial literatures are too often configured as being in some kind of relationship to Europe. Isn’t this just a different kind of Eurocentrism? Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town shows up the inadequacy of a European literary tradition to the stories she wants to tell.
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Thinking about imperialism with Hannah Arendt
There is, currently and running until the 18th of October 2020, an exhibition on at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin on Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century. My interest in the exhibition was roused by recently having read The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, unfortunately for me, made up a relatively small part of the exhibition.
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Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjey-Brenyah: an ilb event
Last Friday evening I tuned in to livestream the ilb’s reading with Nana Kwame Adjey-Brenyah of Friday Black, a collection of short stories that explores issues of race and social justice in dystopian near-future settings.
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The Vanishing Half
The story begins with the return of one half of a pair of twins to her small hometown in Louisiana. The Vignes girls, as identical in appearance as they are opposite in character, begin inseparable and end worlds apart. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half tells the strange story of their lives, and those of their daughters.
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the things I am thinking while smiling politely
The novella treads a complex and delicate line in its negotiation of personal wrongs and structural injustices as they collide and intersect.
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The Story of Us
Ali’s writing is characterised by a felicitous turn of phrase. She has a way of buckling two or three words together in surprising but evocative ways, and a capacity for refreshing metaphor.
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Europe and the Postcolonial: Visiting the Treptow Museum
The exhibition ZurückGESCHAUT at the Treptow Museum in Berlin distinguishes itself, to my mind, not so much for what it presents as for how it does this. It opened in October 2017 and was the first permanent exhibition to confront Germany’s histories of colonialism, racism and resistance.
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In Search of Better Skies: An Interview with Jennifer Neal
On the 8th of July 2020, Jennifer Neal joined us on zoom and gave us some insights into her work. She is an Australian-American writer, artist and occasional stand-up comedian who currently lives in Berlin. She has published short stories and a wide array of journalistic articles and essays, and has recently finished a novel. Jennifer talked to us about writing nature and environment, and shared some thoughts on speculative fiction.
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Freshwater
What makes Freshwater exceptional and so valuable as a literary intervention is the way it turns Western epistemologies of mental health on their head.
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