Margellos Series

Cosmic Order and Modernity

Laszlo F. Foldenyi— In Venice, in an of the out-of-the-way corner of the Piazzetta located at the corner of the basilica of Saint Mark, there is a statuary group depicting the Four Tetrarchs. Carved out of the hardest granite, the sculpture, dating from the beginning of the fourth century, depicts

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A Tribute to Kiki Dimoula

On February 22nd, internationally-renowned Greek poet Kiki Dimoula passed away at the age of eighty-nine. One of Greece’s most beloved writers, Dimoula was decorated with the European Prize for Literature, the Greek State Prize, and the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Prize, among other awards, and in 2002 she was inducted

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“Do You Live in Paris?”

Patrick Modiano— She introduced me to her brother a few weeks after we’d met, a brother she had never mentioned before. Once or twice I’d tried to find out more about her family, but I could tell she was reluctant to answer and I didn’t insist. One morning, I entered

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Remember What You Did?

António Lobo Antunes— My mother was their first cousin, meaning the first cousin of the father, not of the black son who was never his son though he treated him as a son and the black treated him as his father, the cousin of my mother brought him back from

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Do You Know China?

Patrick Modiano— At what point in my life did I meet Henri Marignan? Oh, I couldn’t have been twenty at the time. I think of him often. Sometimes he seems to have been one of my father’s multiple incarnations. I don’t know what became of him. Our first meeting? It

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Dead at Last

Máirtín Ó Cadhain— It was a ratty voice on the other end of the telephone, her sister calling from his house. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself gallivanting around, and your wife just dead.’ ‘She is dead,’ N. said. ‘Yes.’ It was as much as he could think of saying. With

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Book of Collateral Damage

Sinan Antoon— A drop of sweat fell on the edge of the piece of paper and I stopped reading. His handwriting was neat and confident. The ink was black, maybe from a ballpoint pen. The words were perched like birds on lines that looked like small sky-blue threads running across

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From Automatic Writing to Artificial Intelligence: On Translating Can Xue’s Fiction

Annelise Finegan Wasmoen— Across interviews and essays, the experimental writer Can Xue characterizes her fiction in two ways that speak to what are also questions about translation: as, at once, the embodied performance of freedom, and, at the same time, as an automatic process predicated by a logic or mechanism.

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Desirable Body

Hubert Haddad; Translated by Alyson Waters— One autumn morning, Cédric awoke with a start and sat up in bed as daylight filtered through the blinds. He must have been dreaming about the woman he loved, but her name escaped him. Had they broken up? Even though he had difficulty imagining

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The Skin of Chaos —The Letters of Adonis and Adel Abdessemed (part 3)

This is part three of a three-part series. Read part one and two. World-renowned poet Adonis and award-winning artist Adel Abdessemed present a record of their passionate conversations in Paris in this collection of letters written between June 2013 and February 2015.  Presented exclusively for the first time here in anticipation

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