The literature section of issue 35 (“What is violence for?”) features two newly translated works that take up the issue’s animating question: Yousri Alghoul writes from Gaza about the surreal—and all too real—experience of living amid unremitting instability and destruction, while Jenny Erpenbeck reflects, in a series of vignettes, on living among the artifacts of Germany’s Nazi past and the more mundane losses of the present.
And don’t miss a new interview with Alghoul and his translator, Graham Liddell, up on our Substack now, about the writing process for the story, their collaboration, and why writing is an act of madness.
Want to talk about these stories—and the rest of the issue—in person? Come to our issue 35 release party, this Wednesday in New York.
I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.
Two conversations with Yousri Alghoul and Graham Liddell
“Not just in ‘A Letter to Vania,’ but also in the other stories in my collection John F. Kennedy Sometimes Hallucinates, I try to turn my short stories into something fantastical. I try to ‘fantasticize’ them—meaning to make something real out of fantasy and to make something fantastical out of reality.”
The drip catchers that graced the spouts of the large coffee pots that used to sit on the table at every German family reunion—those drip catchers disappeared when the children born during the last days of the war finally rebelled against their parents and stopped planning family reunions, preferring instead to travel to Italy and bring back espresso makers from there.
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
