Gretchen McCullough reviews the new Hoopoe Press edition of Radwa Ashour’s complete trilogy: Granada, Maryama, and Departure.
February 04, 2025
“The book was used, sour-smelling, and I know as a writer I’m supposed to love the smell of old books, but I wanted to gag.”
As one of the world’s preeminent writers, Devi’s work tests readers’ ethics while crossing corporeal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Here, a professor of global francophone literature shares how she and her students found enlightenment in such multiple crossings.
“What I learned in the meantime is the art of saying more with less. No need for an accumulation of adjectives, of adverbs, of endless descriptions. I have learned to be spare.”
As the juror who nominated Devi for the Neustadt Prize, Fabienne Kanor made a passionate case for her work when the jury convened on the University of Oklahoma campus in October 2023. Dr. Kanor wrote the following encomium for this issue’s cover feature.
“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)
(books read when drunk)
Avid reader Andor Femin and the narrator of this flash fiction don’t always see eye to eye, but their observations about reading are always amusing.
Stone Baby
A CT scan leads to a surprising discovery in this short fiction from Australia.
Game Land
Welcome to Game Land, where your every pleasure will be satisfied.
“Han Kang’s literature is a genre in its own right. In fact, she was a poet before she became a novelist. The literary trail she has followed is characterized by a tenacious poetic language composed of all-white bones blasting the past. ”
What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? From Gone with the Wind to detective novels, Immanuel Kim provides an overview of reading in the DPRK.
Reminding us that “freedom is a muscle,” a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose own Drum Dream Girl has been banned urges us to set aside fear and speak, write, and read about liberty and equality.
5 Questions for Devika Rege
Devika Rege’s novel Quarterlife (Liveright, 2024) is populated with millennials who are discovering who they are and what they’re for in what is sometimes called “the New India.” The novel was a finalist for and won multiple awards in India and was recently hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “the best debut of the year.”
5 Questions for Zahid Rafiq
In December 2024 Tin House published Zahid Rafiq’s debut short-story collection, The World with Its Mouth Open. In these eleven stories from Kashmir, ordinary people have unusual days, which play out in city streets, parks, shops, a graveyard, and a home construction site, where those digging make a strange discovery.
“Literature Is Iceland’s Cultural Legacy”: A Conversation with Thórdís Helgadóttir
An interview with Icelandic poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Thórdís Helgadóttir
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