A Very Cold Winter

A Very Cold Winter, by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit). This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war. The New Yorker

The Dark Side of Kodak

In her new book, Tales of a Militant Chemistry, Alice Lovejoy ’01 tells a different kind of war story, about the role film companies themselves played in developing weapons of war. At the same time the United States was fighting Nazi Germany, her book reveals, film giant Kodak was fighting its chief rival, German film and chemical company Agfa, both contributing to their respective war efforts. [...]

Later, the U.S. military asked Kodak to help enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project using centrifuges at its chemical subsidiary, Tennessee Eastman. At the same time, rival Agfa was producing chemical weapons in Germany, using forced labor from concentration camps.

Kodak continued its relationship with the military after the war, helping photograph nuclear tests in Nevada. When radioactive particles showed up while developing film at company headquarters in Rochester, New York, Kodak became part of a secret network of sites to test the flow of harmful radioactive fallout in the atmosphere, even as the larger public was kept in the dark.

“You can see the tension that exists between producing these technologies and living with the consequences of them,” says Lovejoy. Those are questions we’re still grappling with, she says, adding that some factories involved in cell phone production use rare earth minerals from war-torn areas. “It’s part of a larger history about what produces media and what it might mean to make industries more ethical and sustainable.” Michael Blanding, The Brown Alumni Magazine

il libro di cui si parla è: Alice Lovejoy, Tales of a Militant Chemistry (University of California Press). 

 

Neighbors

For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. [...] 

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. Tyler Foggatt, The New Yorker

International Booker Prize 2026 Longlist

 “Many of the submitted books examined the devastating consequences of war, which is reflected in our longlist,” said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown. “The list also features petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, big pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison, and obscure film references. The page counts range from ‘pocket-friendly’ to ‘doorstopper’. And while the books’ original publication dates span four decades, each story feels fresh and innovative.” Ella Creamer, The Guardian

Hamartia

One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.

In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step... Jonathan Bate, Jonathan Bat's Literary Remains

e, per finire febbraio e l'inverno, una bella foto della grande nevicata a Providence, in RI