Sponsored by Summer Classics at St. John’s College

Darryl Pinckney
Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels and essays are marked by her struggle against gender hierarchies and the legacies of colonialism.

Ingrid D. Rowland
An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

Gary Saul Morson
The Master of Toska

Janet Malcolm called Chekhov’s work “a kind of exercise in withholding.” A new book traces the development of his mastery to two crucial years.

Anahid Nersessian
The Couple Form

Two new poetry collections embrace the potential of traditional forms and of breaking away from them.

Karan Mahajan
Avoidance Issues

In his new novel, Mohsin Hamid wholeheartedly embraces the role of the “world writer.”

An Airplane or a Helicopter

a poem by 
Oleh Kotsarev

an argument arose
what is that loud buzzing in the sky
as if from an old abandoned
garden behind the house
on the market square…

Tim Parks
DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

Jon Allsop
The War of the Rose

France’s once-powerful Socialist Party has been in steep decline. In a moment of political crisis, can its leader revive it?

Free from the Archives

Please Please Me, the first album by the Beatles—which included the title track, “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love Me Do,” and “Twist and Shout”—came out in the UK sixty years ago yesterday. In January 1968, a month after the release of Magical Mystery Tour and eleven months before The White Album, the composer Ned Rorem wrote about “one of the most healthy events in music since 1950”: the ascendance of the Fab Four.

Ned Rorem
The Music of the Beatles

“The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e., in spite of the claims of people under thirty about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.”