notes on "literary" literary criticism

Dear Reader,

?What kinds of books do you review?? Sometimes we’ll get that question, which then necessitates the babbling response that, well, the ERB isn’t?just?a book review, that we’re a sprawling literary magazine! Etc. etc. Yet the review in the grand sense (not the consumer-rating sense) is a fundament of the magazine, which in turn eventually opens the theoretical chasm:?what is literary criticism for? Trick question. What?isn’t?it for?

But while we’re on the topic, let’s consider pitches to the ERB. Many readers of this newsletter are critics, writers and scholars themselves, and our submissions box is open. Is there a formula? No. But there are tendencies: we want to cast the literary critical net wide, beyond the anglophone province, beyond our linguistic limits, and for that we depend on contributors. To broaden the canon, to surprise and delight. More than other magazines, we find ourselves editing essays about literature written in languages we don’t speak, all while striving for a criticism that is itself, well,?literary. This potent mix—both an unusual freedom and a very high bar—requires a certain trust between writer and editor.?Have a look at our submissions guidelines here.

Snag ERB Issue One in print from?various shops online.?Subscribe to the ERB?and Issue Two will greet you at your door.

* This week for free, from behind that annoying paywall *?

???To see a city?Alexander Wells on death, editing, and the European novel

Daniela Hodrová’s?City of Torment?(Tryznivé město), a magical-realist trilogy of novels set in Prague, is newly available in English. In a capacious essay, Alexander Wells reads Hodrová against the ?the typical anglophone canon of Czech literature?, against the backdrop of Czech history, against the real and mythic Prague.??Like Woolf’s London or Joyce’s Dublin, Hodrová’s Prague is an ‘Unreal City’ that also happens to exist.? It exists in fragments, to be sure, narrated by humans and other creatures, by objects, by ghosts. (?What if all fictional characters from novels continue to dwell somewhere, just like the dead??) But those fragmented narratives, sewn together, make something deeply European.?Read the essay →

????Eat the dust?Patricio Pron on criticism and deadly critical geese?

?S?ren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to ‘the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese.’? What martyrdoms does today’s bookishness portend??In a wry, sometimes confessional dispatch from Spain, Patricio Pron searches for good criticism and gathers bad criticism. And he faces the impossible question: ?Who or what is literary criticism for?? And: ?is it supposed to be?nice?? The questions lead us through the performative bookishness of our own era (luxury faux books, erudite zoom-backgrounds, tote bags), to older laments about criticism’s sad decline. One feels the edifice of literary criticism teetering (like a construction crane, propped perilously on a steep incline) and yet!—?literary criticism is an act of love?, and it doesn’t collapse.?Read the essay →

* EXTRA*?

Thomas Pikkety on rising inequality and the democratisation of Europe??Wednesday, 28 September, 17:00–18:00 CET, the ERB’s founding partner,?Studio Europa Maastricht, will live-broadcast a lecture by Thomas Piketty. The French economist and author of?Capital in the Twenty-First Century?(2013),?Capital and Ideology?(2019) and?A Brief History of Inequality?(2022) will speak, in English, about??Rising inequality and the democratisation of Europe?.?Register here?→?Piketty’s lecture is part of Studio Europa’s?symposium on the past, present, and future of the Maastricht Treaty, 30 years on.?