Readings

From The Fly and Videodrome to A History of Violence, the director has long regarded the body with equal parts fascination and fear. His approach has changed, but as a new exhibition of his props and artifacts shows, his focus on the flesh remains.

It was the Siberian site of the Russia’s gulags—a remote region for those in exile or seeking safety. But with Dostoevsky, Eisenstein and Solzhenitsyn among its residents, willing or not, Kazakhstan’s unique cultural history can’t be ignored.

In our second dispatch from IFOA, Isabel Greenberg bring a comic to life, Xiaolu Guo wraps us up in language, and Anne Carson talks about Krapp Hour.

Maintaining a casual fascination with serial killers is macabre and almost entirely unnecessary, but it may actually have psychological benefits for the obsessive. At the very least, you’ll never be totally surprised if someone tries to kill you.