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.

Sometime before the night between 1st and 2nd November, 1975, when he was brutally murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini met with the English journalist Peter Dragadze, with whom he had maintained a dialogue for six years and to whom he had given many interviews. On that day, Dragadze showed him a few papers, where he had gathered Pasolini’s opinions on various topics, explaining that they would become part of a long article devoted to the poet’s life and work. Pasolini seized the notes, took them with him, and a few days later, in the last encounter with his English friend (who he affectionately called ‘a pest’), he returned them to him saying: ‘This is almost a spiritual and intellectual testament. If anything happens, Dragadze, publish it. I think that some people might find it interesting.’ Two weeks later, the text was published in the weekly newspaper Gente with the title ‘Almost a testament’.

This centenary, at least in Italy, was full of surprises. For several years and as recently as just last year, the entire debate around Pasolini, with very few exceptions, seemed to be limited to an examination of the homophobic or political causes behind his violent death. The question of it being a poet who had been murdered was not considered at all, not least because there was widespread doubt as to whether Pasolini had actually been a poet at all. Today, however, the chorus is unanimous: it was a poet who died on the beach at Ostia, just a stone’s throw from Rome. Pasolini was a poet not only when composing his verses, but also when writing his novels, from Ragazzi di vita to Petrolio;a poet when preparing texts for the theatre or directing his films; a poet when claiming on the pages of Corriere della sera that he knew the names of those who had instigated massacres that had spilled so much blood in Italy, but that he could not divulge them for lack of proof.

In the first few months of 2022, celebrations marking the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth have proliferated: universities, cultural centres, periodicals, libraries, radio programmes, museums, local authorities, publishers and film producers have been honouring the artist with conferences, special initiatives, talks, exhibitions, film viewings, debates, documentaries and a great many new publications. And this is all taking place not only in Italy but in other countries as well. There is perhaps no other Italian writer who has been so amply commemorated apart from Dante, whose death seven hundred years ago was marked in 2021. However, what is striking is not only the number of initiatives dedicated to Pasolini, but the enthusiasm with which they have been received. How can this be explained?

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.