In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns

In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns

James Cairns begins his new collection of essays, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, with a quotation from the American writer Franny Choi (it’s the title of one of her poems): “The world keeps ending, and the world goes on.” While that well-chosen epigraph gathers what Cairns has to say about crisis into one sentence, it would be a shame if readers of this review were to substitute that epigraph for an engagement with Cairns’s thou…