A Little Workshop of Stories
Essays on the damned and the forgotten
Apocrypha brings together essays on writers, thinkers, and books that have remained on the margins of the canon or have deliberately eluded it. These texts attend to voices that history did not know how—or did not wish—to preserve, to ideas that were too free, too quiet, or too unsettling to become common ground. Apocrypha is not an attempt at rehabilitation, but a search: a reading against forgetting and a way of writing beyond safe lines.
Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers opens with an image of young Joseph gazing into the dark bottom of a well, reflecting on the past. The deeper his gaze penetrates, the darker the reflection becomes, until it finally turns into shadow. Breaking free from the spell of the well, Joseph runs off into his bright … Read more
Calderón’s hero Sigismundo, imprisoned all his life, is granted a single day of freedom. His jailers drug him and transfer him to the royal palace, where Sigismundo awakens dressed in splendid garments. The courtly entourage informs him that he is a prince and heir to the throne. Deprived for years of life’s pleasures, Sigismundo becomes … Read more