David Auerbach

Articles

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  The Other Condition: Robert Musil on Theater

  An immensely valuable collection of the great modernist’s plays and theater writings....

  David AuerbachJan 28, 2021

  • Fiction

  • Translation

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  The Soul of the Body: William Empson’s “The Face of the Buddha”

  David Auerbach on William Empson’s “The Face of the Buddha.”...

  David AuerbachMay 7, 2017

  • Art

  • History

  • Religion

• 

  Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump

  What can "The Man Without Qualities" teach us about Donald Trump?...

  David AuerbachAug 7, 2016

  • Fiction

  • Politics and Economics

• 

  A Delville of a Tolkar: Martin Gardner’s “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus”

  Undiluted Hocus-Pocus has no dramatic revelations to offer about Gardner, but it reveals the mentality that shaped itself around his encyclopedic interests....

  David AuerbachNov 4, 2013

• Revenge of the Dryasdusts: Paul Hazard’s “The Crisis of the European Mind”

  IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A BOOK as simultaneously erudite and irreverent as Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715 being written today. (Perhaps such books were never written in English.) French historian Hazard (...

  David AuerbachJun 17, 2013
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  Devourer of Encyclopedias: Stanislaw Lem's "Summa Technologiae"

  AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem’s oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science ...

  David AuerbachMay 13, 2013

• Scenes from the Resistance: Georges Perec’s “La boutique obscure”

  GEORGES PEREC'S dream journal, which he kept between 1968 and 1972 and published in 1973 as La boutique obscure, is bookended by two dreams about concentration camps. The first is elliptical, disconnected, and impressionistic, a hazy vision of an experience he ...

  David AuerbachMar 6, 2013