Emma R. Cohen
Emma R. Cohen is a writer, dancer, and PhD student currently based in Chicago.
Like Mann’s wide-eyed Castorp, The Empusium follows Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Polish patient seeking treatment in the mountain town of Görbersdorf at the cusp of World War I. Wojnicz strolls and takes rest cures, eats and recuperates, but most of all listens. Herr Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen is full of opinions, and the humanist philologist August August, the Catholic traditionalist Longin Lukas, and the delicate artist Thilo von Hahn jab and parry late into the night.
As Jenn Shapland describes in the titular essay of her new collection, Thin Skin, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico for reasons of personal sentiment—he had traveled there as a child in an attempt to improve his health, and he hoped that the natural beauty of the landscape would inspire his scientists. Yet the impact of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which he directed, ricocheted across time and space.
