October 24, 2024
“Speak once / and stay silent twice / is it a blind coincidence / that you are endowed with
one mouth and two ears?” from “Spectrums of silence and speech,” by Faraj Bayrakdar (trans. Jonas Elbousty)
October 22, 2025
Cherie Dimaline will be the next winner of the renowned NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
“Once an icon in the literary district of Cornhill, Boston, Brattle Book Shop now fits snugly near downtown, a few paces from the Common. Hidden off Tremont, and down West Street, you’ll find a fairytale courtyard with bookshelves instead of vines growing from opposing walls of this literary oasis.”
Our columnist looks back through the centuries to rekindle our fascination with dust. Using the word itself as her point of departure, she questions what our culture values enough to preserve and how we value things by paying attention to them.
The year is coming to a close, but there are still new books yet to anticipate. Here are a few November and December releases that have caught our collective eye, plus one you can preorder for January.
“you dance / because your bellies are empty . . . / that’s how you fight loneliness & the biting economic meltdown . . . / you men with villages of wives,” from “the dance,” by Vonani Bila
This erasured handmade map was crafted through and over Samuel Penniman Bates’s chapter on the 25th United States Colored Regiment in his History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (first published in 1869).
“On the last solar term of autumn / so many good things are disappearing / The birds have printed their footsteps on the frosted tiles,” from “Frost‘s Descent,” by Ma Yongbo (trans. by Zack Rogow)
Love All
A lover of love, everything Momo does is designed to give her the advantage.
The Roar
Deciding between his mother’s sweet love and his father’s conditional approval, Kimurguk endures a harrowing rite of passage to transform from boy to man.
You Have to Read This!
Be careful what you wish for—especially online, especially if you’re a woman—in this modern adaptation of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.”
Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, few of its residents seem to know much about him. Oliver Raw investigated by visiting northern Ukraine, exploring the parallels between Conrad’s experiences of growing up under czarist oppression and Ukraine’s current struggles against a resurgent Russian imperialism.
In a country where wanting to remain rural is a choice now only available to the wealthy, what does rural mean? Here, Sumana Roy contemplates the stigmas and realities of the rural through a portmanteau of rural and urban.
An American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns.
Fostering Nonviolent Communities with Live Free OKC: A Conversation with Jabee Williams
An interview with Jabee Williams, an Emmy Award–winning hip-hop artist and co-founder of Live Free OKC.
7 Questions for Praveen Herat
7 Questions (and 7 Answers) from In Praveen Herat, whose debut novel, Between This World and the Next (Restless Books, 2024), features a British war photographer who uncovers crime and corruption in a Cambodia beyond the rule of law.
Into the Woods: A Conversation with Italian Writer Maddalena Vaglio Tanet
A conversation with Italian novelist Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, whose debut novel, Untold Lessons, tells the story of schoolteacher Silvia who, plagued by guilt after the suicide of one of her students, suddenly goes missing.
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