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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Jáchym Topol (b 1962), like most Czech authors of his generation, wrote poetry for years before turning to prose His first two collections of poems were both published in samizdat (ie, unofficially and illegally), in 1985 and 1988 The poems here come from V úterý bude válka (Tuesday Will Be War, 1992), his first ‘aboveground’ appearance in print and his last poetry outing prior to his prose debut, Výlet k nádražní hale (A Trip to the Train Station, 1993) Topol’s verse, with its lack of rhyme and meter, may remind English speakers of the Beats Topol himself, however, cites his chief poetic influences as Ivan Jirous, aka ‘Magor’, poet, essayist, and guru of the Czech underground in the 1970s and 1980s; Egon Bondy, a metaphysical philosopher and surrealist poet whose verses served as lyrics for the first album by the Plastic People of the Universe; and Jiří Kolář of Skupina 42 (Group 42), a 1940s association of Czech avant-garde poets and painters inspired by the city and the industrial periphery Thematically, the three selections here reflect several of Topol’s abiding interests and influences, visible in his novels as well: Native Americans, World War II atrocities, and the spy and adventure stories he devoured as a boy —AZ Weapons For as long as I remember I’ve longed for a weapon first it was a bow and arrows the cavaliers dropped like flies I rooted for the Navajos then Jack London in a knit cap with a jack-knife a poor little boy on a ship with wolves I didn’t get mixed up in a real war till later but just a paper war after that I started to carry a knife and arm myself with anonymous letters together with Petr P dodging spears in the woods on Radar Mountain and they didn’t get us 90 for a machete, 120 for tear gas and there’s danger everywhere, in everything I bought my wife the gas I want to get her a handgun she objects, she says: ‘where would we end up if everyone thought like that?’ and ‘you’d just be spreading more evil in the world’ We wait for the rapist on long nights planning how he’ll cross the

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Art

November 2016

The Green Ray

Agnieszka Gratza

Art

November 2016

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Walt Whitman, Leaves...

Interview

August 2016

Interview with Daniel Sinsel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Interview

August 2016

In the decade after leaving Chelsea School of Art in 2002, Daniel Sinsel made a name for himself with...

poetry

January 2014

Letters from a Seducer

Hilda Hilst

TR. John Keene

poetry

January 2014

At her death in 2004, Brazilian author Hilda Hilst had received a number of her country’s important literary prizes...

 

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