Frontier Resurrection

The Closing Of The Bulgarian Frontier

Dimiter Kenarov | Switchyard | 19th December 2023

Bulgaria in the 1990s was a place both peculiar and sublime. “It was a feast in a time of plague, a carnival ride amid carnage. Thirty years later, it’s hard for me to explain coherently what happened after ‘the changes’ of 1989. It seems like something out of a dream, scraps of images and phrases and music and emotions jumbled together, a kind of bottled up energy suddenly released” (5,830 words)

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Any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. That’s a carrot problem.

The Resurrection Of The Bawdy

J.C. Scharl | Joie De Vivre | 11th December 2023

The case for still reading Rabelais, whose work was disdained by intellectuals immediately after his death in 1553, and then mimicked by the European literati for the next hundred years. Today, it can show us that “the body is the perpetual problem of literature” — Gargantua and Pantagruel is full of fart jokes — and that “no period of history is as straightforward as we might like to think“ (1,900 words)