Fabricating Children

How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

Julianne Werlin | Life And Letters | 19th July 2024

Shakespeare’s England was in the grips of Malthusian cycles — the population grew until it reached the limits of its resources, and then fell due to want and disease. Aristocrats had a different problem: unlikely to starve, the progeny of the rich were so numerous that they invariably experienced downward social mobility. Most of them could never attain their parents’ status (1,500 words)

Fabricating Dreams

Laura Vigo | Montréal Review | 2nd July 2024

The 53 stations of the Tokaido is the “most formidable series ever printed in Japan”, based on the post-stations dotting the 490-km long road connecting Edo, the shogun’s seat, to the old imperial capital, Kyoto. The result of a collaboration between a small publisher and an amateur artist of the samurai class, these 19C prints established landscape as the defining genre of Japanese print-making (2,600 words)