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Vladimir Putin · MoscowThe Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999 are held to be Vladimir Putin’s original sin, the moment when hundreds of Russians died in their beds to boost his flagging poll numbers. The Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova understood that the Russian security services’ black operation had provided the casus belli for a second Chechen war, and got her little girl, Lana, out of Chechnya for the worst of the fighting. Then they retu…Read Article
Caught between the shadows
United States · United StatesIf it matters, which it doesn’t, the plot of the American multiform artist Tom Comitta’s new novel is a loose picaresque: a narrator seeks a magical snuff box, has a relationship with a woman named Catherine and ends up duelling an aristocrat. The reason the plot doesn’t matter is that Patchwork is obsessed with its compositional gimmick to the total exclusion of story, rhythm or even coherence. Comitta confesses in an afterword that he has not …Read Article
Snuff boxes and Catherines
Delft · DelftIn the title poem of her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1998), Carol Ann Duffy explicitly reverses the male gaze. But where Duffy’s feminist female model sees – and sees through – the male artist and the way he objectifies and misrepresents her, the poetry of Helen Farish, while just as alive to the challenges of writing as a woman, is prepared to recognize not only the compromises but also the freedoms and possibilities inherent in mor…Read Article
