It will do what it is supposed to do
Listening time: 7 minutes. This marvelous prose-poem comes from a travel book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski,...
Which way the wind blows
In totalitarian systems, there is no limit to the perversity and pettiness of mind which can land you in a...
As piercing as …
This piercing stare at a little girl is disturbing for its lack of empathy or even warmth towards a child.  ...
Missing homework
Here Steinbeck suffers a bout of exam nerves before being bombarded with highly intellectual questions from his counterparts in the...
Use your imagination
The path to hell, we've been told, is paved with good intentions.
Faludy, a renowned poet and writer, is given...
Quite the character
At first glance, Florian Wrangel sounds like the kind of person you'd love to have as an occasionally visiting uncle,...
One month or five years
Although I can't vouch for its accuracy, I liked this neat formula for deciding how long to spend getting to...
As puny as …
An ideologically committed army officer expects her child to be born robust and struggle-ready, and is disappointed by his neo-natal...
Normality and absurdity
Grossman is a master of capturing tiny details that show something touchingly ordinary in an extraordinary setting. Here, modelled on...
Didn’t get the memo (or the menu)
A wry comment by Steinbeck on his 1946 visit to Georgia, and the hotel in which he and Robert Capa...
Silence or story?
Ivan is the protagonist of Grossman's novel Everything Flows, apparently modelled on his brother in law. This is an account...
The apostle of freedom
Vasily Grossman sings freedom despite having lived in a time and place where it was desperately rare. Even one of...
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