By Iris Read Three women, topless, slide down a razors edge. Their arms are thrown back as though falling, their heads as though in pleasure. Their eyes are heavily painted, their expressions unclear. This photograph, taken in a Berlin burlesque club in 1923, captures the dark absurdity of the Weimar Republic: a period of liberation […]

By Vanesa Valcheva Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) arrived in Paris in 1965 as a young Bulgarian intellectual and quickly became one of the most provocative voices in French theory. Her contributions are many across philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary criticism. Among these, she grapples particularly militantly and tenderly with the question of what happens to […]

By Radhika Bhargava Perhaps we never settled upon a “Great American Novel” because it has so long been compromised by the tedious subject matter of a man in crisis. The Great American Novel demands a tragic American man, Greek in fate yet exceptional by virtue of self-invention. Jazz Age enthusiasts and high school reading lists […]

By Emily Dillon Upon entering the Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, one is apprehended by an intimidating figure standing sentry to the next rooms of the exhibition. This is Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Pakshi: part-soldier, part-phallus, entirely commanding. Pakshi translated from Sanskrit is ‘bird’, but the Royal Academy have here presented […]