There is nothing “most beautiful and most wonderful” about the coronavirus, to return to Darwin’s words, but it, too, is a thing of nature. We cannot wish away our connection to it. — from LA Review of Books We cannot wish away our connection to COVID-19. Darwin, Karl Kusserow writes,

Kundera’s description of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, ’68: “A system was born (with no advance planning, almost by chance) that was truly unprecedented: the economy 100 percent nationalized, agriculture in the hands of cooperatives, nobody too rich, nobody too poor, schools and medicine for free, but also: the

Doug McEachern, says his bio, in the book I have in my hand, left school wanting to be a writer. The book I have in my hand evidence he succeeded. Having left school, he was caught up in the ’60s. The bio puts it that he was “led astray by

My copy of Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read in its white card cover blue inside embossed with the logo of Fitzcarraldo Press, having taken as long as it does to push a ferryboat over a mountain, has arrived. The day of our return from Rotorua. Its translator says about

Talk–always hard to know how cheap–how dear–usually, Oh Dear –there is talk of the coming recession–“like none in our lifetime” (whose? a strange shared lifetime?)–and of the autocracies evolving from draconian measures adopted under exceptional and unprecedented circumstances. I don’t think this is the

… we have just discussed it. And together, as a team or nation or society or whatever the hell it is, we can do it! We can beat this normality back into the slimy hole from which it has once again begun to slither. Or the right off the barren promontory