“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. This anonymous, yet famous statement, popularized by linguist Max Weinreich, emphasizes the arbitrariness of the distinction between languages and dialects, drawing our attention towards the political processes behind the decision to codify a particular vernacular into formal language, while condemning other linguistic variants into the subcategory of either the dialect, or the idiom.
How can a word simultaneously hold within it innumerable worlds and something as intimate as a single touch, many years ago? A sense of self and calm, several waking nightmares ago.
They say that time heals, but in the case of Varoshia, time is the destroyer of all memory. Does that leave space for the new? Like in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the destiny of any place to just return to dust? But can memory reconcile with the dust? Or is memory just the dust of time?
Norwegian Wood is about travelling. It is about first love and unrequited love. It is about loving one’s self, and especially about loving life. It is about redemption, never giving up, and about being able to let go. It is one of those stories that echo through infinity and remind us that the power of written word can lift us up even when we are feeling sad or depressed.
This place of pure pain. This place of pure contradiction. This place of pure fiction. This place where nothing is pure.
Πως αντιδρούσαν οι άνθρωποι του πνεύματος στο καθεστώς του Λάγκερ, σε σχέση με τους υπόλοιπους; Σε ποιο βαθμό η πνευματική καλλιέργειά τους, η μόρφωση και η τέχνη μπορούσαν να αποτελέσουν καταφύγιο; Εν τέλει, ποια ήταν η αντίδραση του διανοούμενου μέσα σε συνθήκες απόλυτης εξαθλίωσης;
For many of us, summer is a synonym to more time for ourselves. The temperature rises and with it, our desire to do something just for our own personal development or mere enjoyment. One of the most common activities that people tend to jump(or fall ungracefully back) into during vacations is catching up with reading books.
During the quarantine, meeting friends, going to bars, clubs or to the gym, teaching in an actual classroom and all that constituted my past life had vanished. I was left with a virtual classroom, virtual relationships and walking or running in the afternoons. It was then that I started really noticing the strangeness of the sky.
As cliché as the title may sound, I tend to place a lot of emphasis on book covers. A book cover has the power to create a positive or negative presentiment about a book even before I start flipping its pages. Through that first visual encounter, book covers can act as trustworthy predictors of our potential enjoyment or hatred of a book.
The mother dies. Or maybe she kills herself. Or maybe she is killed. The father locks the two-year-old child in a room. Covers up the windows. The father believes that the child, deprived of language, will begin to speak the language of God.
This unreal country 