Current Issue: July - August 2025
PN Review 284

In this issue:

Sasha Dugdale - Benjamin in Moscow
Alberto Manguel - The Library as Macrocosm and Microcosm
The closing lecture at the Bibliothèque de France in Paris to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary
Lesley Harrison - Do Birds Sing?
Iryna Shuvalova - Poems
Translated by Uilleam Blacker
Sinéad Morrissey - Two Poems
Zoë Skoulding - Translation and Relation
Gregory O'Brien - A Letter from Japan
From the Book of Disorderly Days
Nell Prince - Poems

Current Issue: July - August 2025
PN Review 284

Benjamin in Moscow Sasha Dugdale It’s 1926, and the porters of the third-class Moscow Hotel ‘Tirol’ are sitting in a little room off the lobby, bored to death. Outside the night air is silent and the pavements are treacherous, covered in damp ice. Occasionally a sleigh passes on the ring road, but otherwise sound has been sucked out of the world. Follow the dimly-lit narrow corridor from the lobby, a threadbare runner tacked to the boards, and it leads to Walter Benjamin’s room. There are low voices inside, speaking in German; one reading, another commenting from time to time. The Austrian theatre director, Bernhard Reich, is going through the draft of an article about a landmark Meyerhold production. The stale air of the hotel room, the cigarette smoke, the poor light and the smell of boiling laundry and sweat – it all......
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Current Issue: July - August 2025
PN Review 284

The Library as Macrocosm and Microcosm
The closing lecture at the Bibliothèque de France in Paris to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary Alberto Manguel On 23 October 1994, I decided to visit the much-vaunted site in Bercy where the new national library of France was going to be built. Much earlier, when I was in my twenties, I had gone to read in the old library, the one on the Rue Richelieu, to research for the Dictionary of Imaginary Places that I was writing with my friend, Gianni Guadalupi. And because that was the first national library of France I knew, for me, that noble building and its stately Salle Labrouste were (perhaps in my mind still are) an indelible monument in my private French geography. First loves are often the ones that remain steadfast and are blind to factual reason. National libraries, whether almost mythical ones such as that of Alexandria, or almost too down-to-earth ones such as the Vernadsky National......
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Current Issue: July - August 2025
PN Review 284

Do Birds Sing? Lesley Harrison I live in Angus on the east coast of Scotland, above the big fjords of the Forth and Tay, just where the land starts to lean out into the North Sea. Around 6200 BC, a massive failure of the Norwegian continental shelf caused a giant tsunami which swept south and west for hundreds of miles, reaching our coastline in a matter of hours, swamping estuaries and river valleys and barging far inland. As it seeped back, in what had been the soft, grassy bed of a slowing burn, it left a wide scooped-out bowl. The Montrose Basin is now a vast, almost entirely enclosed expanse of slab and mudflat. Twice a day when the tide comes in, it is a shallow, temporary sea. Needless to say it bristles with birdlife: all migrant species of the North Atlantic are present, sometimes......
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