I’m sitting on my parents’ couch, working on the translation of an archival text by the Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, who is most famous, perhaps, for his work on “liquid modernity” and globalization. Though much of his writing was in English, this is one of his earlier works, entitled On Frustration and Conjurers, about the events that took place in Poland in March, 1968—the student uprisings and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign—and there is a discussion of the situation of the working...

In her 1926 essay “Impassioned Prose,” Virginia Woolf seeks to distinguish herself from her Edwardian predecessors, writing that “they ignore [the mind’s] thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams . . . while prose itself . . . will be fit . . . to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.” [1] Like her fellow modern novelists E. M. Forster and Henry James, like Mina Loy with her Lost Lunar Baedeker or T. S. Eliot with his “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar,” Woolf...