Because of your Love, the Air Hurts Me
A mentor dissuades an aspiring poet from writing, extolling Lorca and reading with AI as a superior alternative to creative vanity.
Portrait of Baudelaire
A tragic and visionary dandy, Baudelaire transformed the misery and splendor of Paris into poetry where the abyss becomes beauty.
Collisions
A melancholic song to the absence of Spanish books in the United States, secondhand bookstores, and the loss of words in bilingual collisions.
Bookspel
2025 Cervantes Prize: The Art of Not Disturbing
Institutional mediocrity and a lack of literary risk-taking in the choice of the Cervantes Prize symbolize the cultural domestication of the award.
Essays
From S.B.’s Theater to Pizarnik’s Hell (Miniature V)
An exploration of Beckett's influence on Alejandra Pizarnik.
Book Reviews
Mañach’s New Apotheosis
Editorial Casa Vacía rescues Mañach from the commonplace and brings him up to date.
Loose Pages
Berliozianas: ‘Clair de Lune’ (comp. c. 1890, pub. 1905)
An exquisite and dangerous emotional trap that, under an apparent simplicity, manipulates the listener's melancholy.
Bookspel
Witches, Prophecies, and the Apocalyptic Merch Machine
Apocalyptic feminism as a symbolic and marketable product.
Essays
A Brief Stroll (with RB) Along the Edges of Language
Irony in Barthes, that method of destabilizing the certainties of language, criticism, and discourse.
Essays
Ontological Relics
Lisyanet Rodríguez's work transforms memory and pain into an ontological exploration of humanity, where painting is a form of resistance against forgetting.
Essays
Lezama Looks at El Greco
Lezama sees El Greco as a Baroque painter who fused Venetian and Castilian styles, transcending into modernity.
Jonathan Edax Questionnaire: Marcial Gala
May 24, 2025
A variation on the “Proust Questionnaire.” For those who believe that reading is a sacred act, an incurable disease, or an elegant substitute for social ...
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Fascination with the Abyss. Notes on the Act of Reading I
July 6, 2025
The library, that labyrinth of knowledge and aesthetic pleasure, reflects the insatiable curiosity and chaotic order of a life devoted to reading.
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The polygamous reader: bigamy and libraries in rural Florida
May 11, 2025
Henry Betsey Jr., a Floridian passionate about 19th-century literature, maintained three simultaneous marriages and vast libraries in each home until his bigamy was uncovered.
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A chair and a demon for ‘Un Coup de dés’
April 27, 2025
'Un Coup de dés' represented an impossible challenge for Odilon Redon, who was unable to fully translate abstract silences into images.
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Bloomsday: An Irish Comedy in Eighteen Hours
June 16, 2025
Is Bloomsday the annual celebration where thousands of people pretend to have read ‘Ulysses’ in an eccentric display of scholarly masochism?
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Alfredo Triff: “For the decadent, it is reality that imitates art”
August 6, 2025
The dandy as aesthetic insurrection: mask, myth, and style in times of uniformity.
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