Latest work
-
Existential terror!
Read more: Existential terror!If day elicits terror, night is a singular horror show. In college, I had a lanky, long-haired roommate with a grin on loan from leprechauns. He’d bound through our dormitory apartment – there were five of us – and invariably appear in doorway wearing one of his many faces. He…
-
Cave-car Rome
Read more: Cave-car RomeCorona has ushered in a new system of segregation, the clean and the unclean. Acardiologist is interrupted mid-visit with a patient by an incoming call she says she must take. The electrocardiogram is paused. The call is from a frantic teenager, the daughter of the doctor’s friend. She has fallen…
-
Awoking
Read more: AwokingLong before the spirit of “woke,” a “protective reaction” over Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Iwoke recently from a protracted linguistic slumber to find myself enlightened. During my somnolence, woke had been transformed from the act of shaking off sleep, a verb, into a proto-noun-cum-acronym for any person or institution…
-
Fraternal heretics
Read more: Fraternal hereticsWhen it comes to public places and the workplace, Italy says Green Pass, proof of a negative COVID test, or stay home… My ailing plumber resides in one of Dante’s less agreeable “new normal” cellars. He is desperately ill with liver cancer and its predatory offshoots, and can do no…
-
Ash to ash
Read more: Ash to ashThomas Mann, Flaubert, and Gogol are not visible in this image, In the years before his death earlier this year at the age of 89, my erudite brother had turned away from his lifelong devotion to literature and fiction, a life dominated by teaching comparative literature to graduate students at…
-
On a stalled planet
Read more: On a stalled planetOnly the British have suggested keeping a stiff upper lip amid the two-year pandemic, writes the author, but another Churchill has yet to be found. One friend, an influential member of European mass media, bemoans the disappearance of what he calls “fluidity.” Another, far younger but brilliantly dynamic, calls it…
christopherwinner.com 