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Mar 18, 2025 | 
muse.jhu.edu | Ryan Ruby
Purchase/rental options available: Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP
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Mar 14, 2025 | 
nytimes.com | Ryan Ruby
PERFECTION, by Vincenzo Latronico. Translated by Sophie Hughes. One of the more trenchant portraits of expat life in contemporary Berlin I've encountered in the 11 years I've lived there is "Perfection," by the Rome-born writer Vincenzo Latronico.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby on the Need to Shake Up Our Modern Era of Clean Professionalization Alexander Pope is hardly an unknown quantity.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
sevenstories.com | Ryan Ruby |Don Mee Choi |Jeff Dolven
Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom. Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Ryan Ruby |Jake Harrison
Act One: Berlin and Prague Immanuelkirchstrasse 29 is a short walk from my house in Berlin. The five-story corner apartment went up in the early years of the twentieth century, when Prenzlauer Berg was a mixed-class district of workers and upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, the façade suffered damage in the Second World War and was neglected during the four decades it stood in the capital of the German Democratic Republic.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
newleftreview.org | Ryan Ruby
The title of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, refers to a move in chess, more commonly known as a Zwischenzug, in which a player delays a favourable move, such as the capture of a piece, in order to obtain an extra advantage in position. Scattered throughout are quotations from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The first is to be found in the epigraph: ‘But don’t you feel grief now?
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Ryan Ruby
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley pickpockets the plot of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and turns it into a detective thriller set in the early years of the Cold War. Oblivious shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf taps the eponymous Tom Ripley, a low-life grifter and petty criminal, to be the “ambassador” to his wayward son Dickie, who has been painting and soaking up martinis and sunshine on the Amalfi Coast in the company of the aspiring novelist Marge Sherwood.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
newleftreview.org | Ryan Ruby
The American language, like the American landscape, is a trash heap.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
thenation.com | Ryan Ruby
Thank you for reading The Nation!We hope you enjoyed the story you just read. It takes a dedicated team to publish timely, deeply researched pieces like this one. For over 150 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and democracy. Today, in a time of media austerity, articles like the one you just read are vital ways to speak truth to power and cover issues that are often overlooked by the mainstream media.
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Jan 2, 2024 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Jake Harrison |Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby Regrettably, I must begin with the quantitative — the least Proustian of all categories. The six-volume Modern Library Edition of D.J. Enright’s revision of Terrance Kilmartin’s reworking of Andreas Mayor’s and C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 4,347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred and fifty words, or one page, per minute, it takes approximately seventy-two hours, or three days, to read it.
