The European Review of Books

Blue, this time with a layer of aquamarine. Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear plant, rails that still run through Ukraine’s war, and a Ukrainian great-grandmother turned pro-Russian cosplay icon. Plants in Bulgaria and Western wellness, Bolívar’s tongue stretched across continents. Untranslatable names, Joséphine Baker on Palestine’s seafront, and a liquid Europe.

The European Review of Books is a magazine of culture and ideas, in print and online, in English and in a writer’s own tongue. We publish book-length print issues three times a year, and digital pieces each week. No review of books reviews only books, nor does it merely review. We publish many kinds of writing: fiction, travelogue, provocation, parody, poem, come what may. In general we champion the essayistic mode. A good essay is the antidote to the measly « opinion », the enemy of the airy platitude. We want avenues to the arcane, the profane, the grand.

The ERB’s gambit is to publish both in English and in a writer’s mother tongue. Pieces written in Greek or Arabic or Italian or Polish or Dutch—or, or, or—will be available in English and in the original.

That approach is an experiment, both strategic and romantic (not to say quixotic), in trans-linguistic editing. English is Europe’s ironic lingua franca. Ostensibly the language of the one country that has exited the EU, the English we actually speak is something else: post-American English? Eurish? Global English? Is it a connective tissue or a linguistic pall laid over the life of the mind? English is more and more a common denominator, but a common denominator for what? The fact that it’s possible to get by in English, that English is practically second-nature among young Europeans, can give the impression of an inclusive lingua franca, as frictionless as the flows of goods and capital. But it’s a fantasy, and to celebrate it is to celebrate a shallow internationalism.

Therefore! The ERB is an English-language magazine that resists, or plays with, the seeming hegemony of English. Committed both to a true lingua franca and to exclusive fluencies, to translation and to the untranslatable, we can discover new writers and new solidarities, within and beyond « Europe ». Call it predicament, irony, contradiction, paradox: we want to use the ubiquity of English to animate the multilingual.