Edward F. Fischer, Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value
reviewed by Sean Russell
When I worked as a barista I found there were two types of customer. The ones that bemoaned the price of the coffee as too expensive, and those who were happy to pay extra, seeing it as benefitting those who farmed the beans in faraway and exotic places. Well, good coffee should be expensive, but the truth is that most of the profits — even of so-called third-wave artisan coffee — still remain in the place of consumption, not production. Meanwhile, the farmers, while undoubtedly doing... [read more]
Marguerite Duras, trans. Emma Ramadan & Olivia Baes, The Easy Life
reviewed by Daisy Sainsbury
Published in 1944 when the author was 30, The Easy Life was Marguerite Duras’s second novel. Thanks to co-translators Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, it is now appearing in English for the first time, nearly 80 years later. Very few of Duras’s works have remained untranslated for so long, which poses the obvious question of why. Was the delay simply a product of happenstance? Or is this early novel not very good? The answer, I suspect, is somewhere between the two. Set on an isolated... [read more]
In his 1952 disquisition on the experience of blackness, Black Skin, White Masks, the French-Martinique philosopher Frantz Fanon asserts the equality of all men before recounting his experience of an encounter with a white family. Fanon writes that, among black friends and family, his blackness was unremarkable, but this changes under the racialising gaze of empire: ‘the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me.’ It is this unfamiliar weight... [read more]
To read about Vladimir Sorokin is to be inundated with suppositions about real-world analogues. Who or what was the inspiration for this passage of remarkable scatology, violence, profanity, fascistic activity — or some amalgamation of the four? Often considered Russia’s leading contemporary novelist, Sorokin’s work has been long suppressed by the authorities of his own country. However, the rate of English translation has distorted American critics’ ideas of relevance, drilling... [read more]
Mariana Enríquez gets good book covers. For her Man Booker-nominated short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a disembodied face floats, a cigarette hanging out of one eye, a long-nailed hand curling around the other. For her latest book, Our Share of Night — her first novel published in English — that hand yawns out to fill the entire cover. It is a silhouette, the fingernails again horrifying and long, this time gold. They snag your attention well. Were they to tap at your window at... [read more]
Philip Ó Ceallaigh settled in Bucharest at the end of the 1990s, and since then most of his stories have taken place in eastern Europe. In deadbeat neighbourhoods and stifling apartment blocks, their protagonists eke out austere livings. His lauded first collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) depicts Bucharest — ‘that terrible city which wears you down’ — as itself eroded, full of corruption and decay. The crumbling blocks are ruins of the Communist era, Ceaușescu’s... [read more]
Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
The United States was born in a bloody civil war, which over the course of eight years not only dismembered the British empire in North America, but also wrought transformative destruction on indigenous communities and created displaced populations from Canada to Florida, New Orleans to the west African coast. Uprisings, insurrections, filibusters, and secessionists have plagued the republic ever since — just as they have other settler-colonial empires. The Civil War of 1861–65, which ended... [read more]
The oldest text in the Friulian language is a 14th-century poem. ‘Piruç myo doç inculurit,’ it begins, ‘Quant yò chi vyot, dut stoy ardit. . .’ ‘My pear so sweet, so coloured, / When I see you, I feel brave.’ You could mistake it for a Slavic tongue, all consonants and gutturals. But Friulian is a distant cousin of Italian, descended directly from Latin with a bit of Celtic thrown in. 600,000 people speak it today, almost all of them from their namesake region of Friuli in the... [read more]
In her 2020 book, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Lola Olufemi presented the project of radical feminism as yet to begin. As she writes, addressing young activists, ‘you are making a commitment to a world that has not yet been built.’ The book is split into neat chapters, each focusing on a particular form of violence deployed by the patriarchal operation of the state. It opens with a quote from Christina Sharpe: ‘Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any... [read more]
Deceit is a ruminative and slow-burning novel that reveals as much as it conceals. Written in the form of diary entries by an unnamed narrator, the first impression is of a great candour, even pedantry at getting things exact on the page. The writer, a Russian who has fled the Bolsheviks to live in exile in Paris, begins by unfolding his thoughts with a Proustian languor: paragraph-long sentences; an array of commas and semicolons; strings of adjectives and adverbs. But soon, a sense of... [read more]
