Criticism editor Carlos Rojas introduces the section's contributions, from global climate change, the Israel-Hamas conflict, the political-economic crisis facing contemporary China, and how we understand failure itself, describing the essays as observations as well as interventions into the phenomena they describe.

Comparative literature scholar Irving Goh focuses on the reality of failure itself. Noting that many scholars working in a burgeoning field that could be called failure studies tend to focus on failure as a path to eventual success, Goh instead proposes that it would also be useful to focus on failure as failure.

Seas and history are strewn with tales and remnants of tsunamis, cyclones, and rogue waves that defy our imagination and challenge our survival. Through millennia the ocean has been cursed for its fickleness and spite, blamed for death and destruction. The ocean, however, has a simple defense against these harsh accusations: it is simply doing the bidding of outside forces. Only when pushed is its fury unlocked. 

Yan Lianke, Chinese author, novelist and professor of Chinese literature at Renmin University in Beijing, examines contemporary China through the precepts of knowing without speaking, speaking without exposing, and using mountains as lakes and mulberry trees as locust trees.

Film scholar and documentary film maker Simone Brioni introduces Crazy Fish Sing, a visual art book inspired by Suranga Katugampala’s forthcoming film Still Here.

By Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University

Editor’s Note: Omer Bartov's essay will appear in the next issue of TSLR, scheduled for publication in Spring, 2024. This next issue features two new elements: first, it will be the journal’s first themed issue, with the theme being the concept of Flux; and, second, it will include a new section on Criticism, featuring non-fictional essays on timely topics. Omer Bartov’s essay is one of four pieces that will appear in the next issue’s Criticism section, but given the unusual timeliness of its subject matter, we are pre-publishing the essay here. - Carlos Rojas (Duke)

We are currently living through a period of unprecedented chaos and confusion in the Middle East. As some have predicted, there are signs that the turmoil is spreading ever wider. Yet no formulas have as yet been proposed as to how to put the genie back in the bottle. Violence, strife, and war have a logic of their own. Without conceptualizing concrete political goals, they will keep expanding, feeding on the rage, sacrifice, and vengeance they produce, until at least one of the parties is either exhausted or wiped out.

The situation of flux in which we find ourselves at the moment in the Middle East is just one component of a general sense of confusion and uncertainty in the world, rooted in various factors ranging from economic uncertainly, distrust of political leadership, massive displacement of populations, the long-term effects of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the ongoing climate crisis.

In the face of such an array of threats and fears, one is tempted to simply withdraw into the private sphere, shut out the news, and engage as best one can with the pleasures, or at least the more manageable affairs of daily life. The problem with this choice is that—just as in the case of avoiding political speech on, say, university campuses, for fear of being immediately labeled as supporting one camp or another—it creates a vacuum, which tends to be swiftly filled by the extreme voices. In other words, silence, unclarity, confusion, and passivity themselves generate polarization, whose outcome is ever more strife and violence.