Watching Stalenhag's Dreams

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There is something brilliant about Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag’s works. He seamlessly brings retro and the future; the mundane and the striking together. Abandoned robots, mysterious machinery and even dinosaurs roaming the hyperrealist humdrum of the Swedish countryside has garnered him legions of fans. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from films, commercials and book covers to art directing and concepting for video games. He first began publishing on social media. In 2014...

“Disrupting Can Be a Form of Joy”: A Correspondence with Sara Ahmed

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As a child, I was a troublemaker—or at least, that’s what everyone seemed to decide. Language teachers would flinch at the sudden, sharp...

“Bourgeois Culture Is a Weapon of Violence”: An Interview with Édouard Louis

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Édouard Louis is fearless — and he’s been rewarded for it. In 2014, at just twenty-two, he announced himself with The End of Eddy , a debut that made it clear he would be one of the defining voices of contemporary French literature. He’s been writing ever since with the same uncompromising clarity about his journey from a poor village in northern France to the heart of Parisian intellectual life. Today, his books are translated into dozens of languages, adapted for the stage, and — soon — for...

Derek Ryan on Animal Consciousness, Literature, and the Ethics of Being Human

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We eat animals with indifference, wear their hides as fashion, and subject them to every form of cruelty our ingenuity can devise. What made us so certain that the world was made for us? Why do we cling to that belief, refusing to see the vitality that exists beyond the human sphere? To reconcile ourselves with the suffering we cause, we invent psychological alibis—whole grammars of denial. Can literature pierce those defences? Can it truly imagine the consciousness of another species? I put...

Han Kang on Violence, Innocence, and the Human Desire to Become Plant

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Last year, with her novel The Vegetarian , Han Kang became the first Korean author to win the Man Booker International Prize. The book, translated by Deborah Smith, unsettled readers across the world: a slender, hallucinatory narrative about a woman who stops eating meat, and then, slowly, stops being human. For Yeong-hye, an ordinary Seoul housewife, a series of disturbing dreams transforms her life beyond recognition. She renounces meat, then all nourishment. Her mind fractures, her body...

Fiona Banner and the bastard words

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Fiona Banner has spent decades probing the possibilities and limits of language. Her art does not merely depict or describe; it translates, transmutes, and interrogates. She converts words into images and images into words, revealing the porous boundary between seeing and reading, between perception and interpretation. She has even registered herself as a book in the British Library, an act that crystallizes her lifelong fascination with language as both medium and subject. From the...

A Fishing Crisis in Turkey

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04.02.2021 Centuries-old fishing traditions are facing extinction in Turkey. As industrial fishing expands, traditional fishermen are often pushed below the poverty line to hazardous conditions. Sebnem Bal, 24, wanted to be a designer ever since she was a kid. But, after three years of graphic design education at a university in Istanbul, she had to quit school. She now works as a full-time cashier at a supermarket on the outskirts of Istanbul to support her family, which is in financial...