– Goooooooal!

This cry, which echoes inside itself and extends until it seems inextinguishable, has been endlessly shouted around the world since it was heard on 22nd January, 1927, during the first football commentary broadcast by the BBC, allowing this match to enter English homes.

Widely considered to be the most renowned, dominant and feared literary critic of the last decades, James Wood discusses the different stages of an intellectual journey that has taken him from a religious education in Britain to the most prestigious positions in the American literary world, as a book critic for The New Yorker magazine, a professor at Harvard University, and the author of award-winning novels and essays. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, James Wood reflects on his life and work as a reader, critic, professor and writer.

Golgona Anghel writes poetry in Portuguese, teaches Literature at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University of Lisbon and, like Cioran, was born in Romania. On the subject of poetry and poets, she interprets and comments the ‘bitter’ sentence, as were most of this writer’s sentences.

In this interview, the great North-American painter Alex Katz, who is ninety-five years old and whose works are part of the collections of the world’s most important museums, talks to Juan Manuel Bonet about painting, colour, light, life and the places where it happens. It is an enchanting conversation, full of wisdom and subtlety. Juan Manuel Bonet is a profound connoisseur of the New York-born artist. He was the director of the Reina Sofía Art Centre and of IVAM [Institut Valencià d'Art Modern], where he organised a retrospective dedicated to the painter in 1997. Here, he offers a personal introduction to this powerful work, as well as choosing the images that represent it. Among the exhibitions that will take place in various cities around the world in 2022–23, this autumn Alex Katz’s career will receive a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In the year when we celebrate the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, Carla Benedetti, Bruno Moroncini and Vinícius Nicastro Honesko – authors of essays and studies on the filmmaker, writer, essayist and intellectual – evoke this leading figure of 20th century Italy, highlighting his relevance today.

The Italian sociologist Paolo Perulli, with an extensive body of work in urban development, logistics and territory, traces a genealogy and history of the ‘creatives’, who maintain a necessary link to large cities, but who, in their heterogeneity, can hardly be defined as an autonomous social group.

In Venice, the Bienniale becomes the centre of the world.The Cavalli Franchetti Palace, this year’s Portuguese pavillion, is currently inhabited by the vampires created by Pedro Neves Marques. It is on this narrative installation, wandering backwards and forwards through it, that this ‘Book of Hours’, with its evocations and meditations, science fiction and poetic reflections, is based. Non-binary, Pedro speaks of ‘a future where gestation will be decoupled from gender, and the categories of womanhood and manhood made irrelevant’. He adds: ‘Ecology, gender, anthropology, the embodiment of technologies into cosmotechnics, health and sexuality are all words that have been used, and that I too have used, to think my work.’

Two centuries after his birth, Gustave Flaubert is still questioning both literature and his readers. It is as if the passage of time has made sense of these questions, bringing them up to date and making them more incisive. In her analysis of a central episode in the novel Madame Bovary, Ana Rocha projects what she reads onto a screen and, in the end, the image that we see is that of Flaubert.

Youssef Rakha is an author, journalist, literary critic, editor and photographer. He was born and still lives in Cairo, having studied English and Philosophy in the United Kingdom. His award-winning work is renowned, affording an opportunity for a bold linguistic renewal and reinvention of Arabic. Cairo is a city which discovers itself through his writing. In addition to fiction this author, who has many interests and engages in various activities, has written a great deal about the relationship between photography and literature. In the conversation which took place in Egypt, photographers and editors André Príncipe and João Pedro Cortes talk with Rakha about politics, religion, art, travel, life – the unhappiness we flee from and the hope that eludes us. With this piece, where words and images challenge each other, Príncipe and Cortes continue the series they began with Hisham Mayet in Tangier, published in Electra 7.

Football stirs up such passion in so many people that some have called the phenomenon ‘football fever’. This sport, which has taken over from all others and conquered the world, deserves to be regarded from an analytical and critical point of view, without any empty, unnecessary ‘fevers’. Football today is a very powerful, complex ‘system’ that goes far beyond stadiums and championships and has invaded our everyday lives, even if we are not actually fans. Football is so expansive and plays such an important role in daily routine that it has far overflowed stadiums. It attracts political power and has an extreme, exaggerated crystallising effect on manifestations of economic and media power. It is a world of heroes and cults that are mostly ephemeral and subject to money circulation laws. Glory generally runs fast here and stops for no-one. The anthropological significance of football as a show, a competition and a ritual is a challenge that requires intricate analysis.

The title of a famous work by Vermeer, of which Proust said: ‘It’s the most beautiful painting in the world’, lends its name to this section of Electra. José Manuel dos Santos addresses this work (View of Delft), the city that is represented in it (Delft) and the city where it can be seen (The Hague), in an evocation where the title of the text and the title of the section borrow from each other to become the same.

One of the most eagerly anticipated books of the last decade, the monumental study The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, draws on modern anthropology and archaeology to radically transform how history has been told over the last three centuries, dismantling certain assumptions about social evolution – from the invention of agriculture and the city, to the origins of inequality and democracy – to summon new possibilities for human emancipation. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about a book that has found itself embroiled in a heated intellectual discussion.

We live under the imperial rule of narratives. That is certainly not new. Homo sapiens have always been indistinguishable from homo fabulator, but in the post-truth era, narrative imperialism has grown and intensified (recall that ‘post truth’ was declared word of the year in 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries).