War, that most vain and venerated instrument of national pride, does not merely nudge the price of petrol upward, it rends asunder the delicate machinery of trade itself. Ships are halted, roads reduced to rubble, and the humble materials upon which industry depends are spirited away, so that fewer goods are fashioned while the public, […]
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid […]
Sean Dempsey’s short story “Justice” (which is an extract from his 2022 work “A Sad Collection of Short Stories, Cheap Parables, Amusing Anecdotes, & Covid-Inspired Bad Poetry”) works best when read not as a replacement for Kafka, but as a narrowing of Kafka’s nightmare. Kafka gives us the whole disease. Dempsey gives us the moment […]
