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(Still image from a film by Yto Barrada)

“When I moved the time machine’s lever to the year 1991,/it began to shake severely and seemed as if on fire,” Mikhail writes, recalling the terror of living through Operation Desert Storm.

In the current issue of the @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

In Dunya Mikhail's work, the mythic, the journalistic, and the poetic meet; war transforms into a Type A character, and Enheduana talks with Siri in a dream. My latest in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

If you follow the sun around the globe at six o'clock, it's always six o'clock.

snrk.de/breakfast-in...

Through Alice's eyes we see a complete subversion of the adult social world, revealing how rule-bound conventionality is inextricable from other states—of dream, illusion, play, and counter-passages of time.

In Episode 4 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, it's always six o'clock. Marina Warner and I step across the silvery mist of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass, to a place where queens scoot backwards and can remember the future. We ask, who was it that dreamed it all? @lrb.co.uk

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Sahlins detected “a clear and simple law of revolution”: that it is the rulers, not the revolutionaries, who undermine a society’s government. “It is from deep traditional values that the opposition draws its outrage—and in defense of them, takes to the streets.” www.thenation.com/article/cult...

... in the gap between our knowledge, which can only be partial, and our fantasy, which can reach towards totality, "we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it,” this exit route to another city or an otherworld.

We look at the relationship for Calvino between the fantastic and his anti-fascist politics, and in contemplating his incantatory last line, at how the literature of the imagination opens up portals. “An opportunity for escape exists," Calvino wrote elsewhere...

These cities, "too probable to be real," are narrated by Polo as bedtime stories for a brooding sovereign in the twilight of his empire. Says Polo to Kublai Khan: "If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance."

We voyage through cities made entirely out of plumbing, populated by water nymphs; through cities of desire, memory, and rumor, built on a collective dream; through cities like New York, perpetually under scaffolding—for when the construction stops, the destruction will begin.

In Episode 3 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, Marina Warner and I enter the labyrinth of Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES, and the text that inspired its frame, the 13th century travels of Marco Polo, composed from a prison cell. www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @lrb.co.uk

We end with Gulliver's encounter with the highly-rational quadrupeds who are contemplating the genocide of man, and the still urgent questions Swift poses about the dark side of Enlightenment rationality. Can reason itself be salvaged? Or is there something else that should take its place?

... how the words-on-wood prophesies AI models; the relationship between the fantastic and language; the idea that, if only the words were different, somehow everything could change.

Topics may include! analysis of disgusting treasures; reverse creation myths; Gulliver as Grildrig or "girl-thing"; expulsion from paradise; the abjection of immortality; fantasy and misanthropy (we are stuck with ourselves, so how do we live?); Lilliputian theology (burial with head upside-down)

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1726) is often read as satire, but what do we learn if we read it as fantasy, as not only a comment on its own contemporary political realities, but as speculation or hypothesis of an alternative future? What worlds does Gulliver open up for us, almost 300 years later?

Episode 2 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC is out, wherein Marina Warner and I take on a longtime favorite of mine—and to each her own pronunciation of "Houyhnhnm," the race of intelligent horses who have colonized mankind... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @londonreview.bsky.social

There are now more than fifty LRB writers on Bluesky - including @torilmoi.bsky.social, @jessiechilds.bsky.social, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social and @bekadiski.bsky.social with writing in our new issue and on the blog this week.

Read and follow them here:
go.bsky.app/5CZWQgk

Topics may include: storytelling as salvation; the relationship between imagination and eroticism; who are the jinn and can you marry one?; illusion and the inventions of language; how enchanted fiction stands not opposite to reason, but as a form of it.

The first episode is out today, on THE THOUSAND & ONE NIGHTS, a text that takes place in the blurred space between night & day, dream & awakening, life against death. We read from two poetic, beguiling scenes from Yasmine Seale's new translation.

Introducing FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, a new podcast series from the LRB, wherein Marina Warner and I traverse the classics of enchantment, to discover how it has been a mode of inquiry and hypothesis.... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @londonreview.bsky.social

Here are some of my favorite reads from 2024.

(See alt text for authors and titles.)

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