Photo by Oscar Sutton / Unsplash During quarantine, a poet, essayist, and aphorist returns to the aphorism, the “sushi of literature.” If life has placed you on probation, best to proceed wi…

Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 CE), “How to Read” 論語集注, in Sishu jizhu 四書集注, Sibu beiyao edition (National University of Singapore) In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton Un…

Geoff Livingston, “America Is a Land of Immigrants,” Dulles International Airport, January 28, 2017 Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner’s slip he cam…

Portrait of Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) by A. Ferrazzi(Casa Leopardi, Recanati, Italy, 1820). Source: Wikipedia. A review of Zibaldone, by Giacomo Leopardi. Ed. Michael Caesar…

A Q&A with Translator Karla Gruodis This month, Guernica will publish A Small Map of Experience: Reflections and Aphorisms by Lithuanian writer Leonidas Donskis, a philosopher, cultural c…

An aphorism is a distilled, laconic reflection about the author’s intimate experiences of reality, expressed through paradox, provocation, or shocking self-disclosure. Aphorisms cannot be conceived th…

Aphorisms were the form that gave me the most relief, that offered the deepest bloodletting. In the aphorism, I didn’t have to say “I,” I could just let the thing speak itself, so I didn’t feel compr…