Hegel remarked about the Peloponnesian War that its importance is that it allowed Thucydides to write about it and the same could be said about another armed conflict from the ancient Greek world: the struggle between an alliance of Greek states and the city of Troy, in what is now […]

Jorie Graham’s “To 2040”, which provides the title for her latest collection of poetry, is a terrifying vision of what comes after the ecological meltdown that the present economic order is hurtling us towards.   Sean Sheehan   The human sense of time’s passage is endangered, minutes become indistinguishable from […]

Epics and mythical stories were good at visualizing beasts that only a hero or a god could defeat. Such creatures tend not to appear in modern-day novels but dementia could be described as a monster that hasn’t gone away, one that is continuing to grow more fearsome.   Sean Sheehan […]

It is 1955 and Brigitte Reimann, who has wanted to be a writer since the age of 14, is now 22. She lives in the eastern half of a country divided by post-WW2 geopolitics into opposing parts, one effectively controlled by the US (West Germany) and the other by Russia […]

Words like provocative, unruly, radical easily come to mind but seem inadequate when discussing Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the hyper-prolific filmmaker whose untimely death in 1982 signalled the end of a politically tumultuous period in German history.   Sean Sheehan   To be more exact, the history of the western half […]