globalization

An Interview with Guy Verhofstadt

Michał Matlak: Do you have your preferred option for settling Brexit? Guy Verhofstadt: My preferred option is clearly No Brexit. Brexit is a bad development for the European Union, and it will be a catastrophe for the UK, especially in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

October 16, 2019

A Game Without Rules

In 1904, three years after the first Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French poet Sully Prudhomme, the English Football Association chose not to participate in the formation of an International Football Federation (FIFA). They could not see the point. Nor in 1930, the year in which Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel, did England participate in the first World Cup: the English objected to the prospect of a ten-day ocean crossing to Uruguay to play teams that meant nothing to them. The first international football game, they pointed out, had been between England and Scotland, in 1872—a time when Alfred Nobel was still focused on improving his dynamite. Who needs Argentina or Brazil when you have Scotland to play?

November 8, 2012

Writing Adrift in the World

If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture.

January 19, 2012

Your English Is Showing

If one suggests that the international literary market is also a power game where different nations set their cultural and political might against each other in bestseller lists and international prizes, one inevitably arouses a certain amount of hostility from those who like to think of literature as operating in a more idealized world of noble aspiration and expression.

June 15, 2011

Franzen's Ugly Americans

Often it feels like Jonathan Franzen’s characters only exist as an alibi for what is really a journalistic and encyclopedic endeavor to list everything American.

May 11, 2011

Eats and Reads

For Italian columnist Giacomo Papi, the essence of contemporary society has been revealed once and for all in the way we eat. It all started, he maintains, in the 1980s, when bow tie pasta with salmon in cream sauce began to appear on Italian menus.

December 2, 2010