For over 20 years, American culture and politics have been watched over, provoked, and lambasted by the Baffler, a gloriously liberal journal, new issues of which appeared, in their own good time, between 1988 and 2007.

Lovers, Daniel Arsand’s newly-translated novella, is a fever dream of romance. Set in the decades before the French Revolution, this story of two boys in love is emotional but not psychological—we know what the characters feel, but not why they feel it.