Edouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), oil on canvas, 252 × 305 cm, Kunsthalle Mannheim / WikipediaPerched grandly and Viennese-pretty on a rocky promontory just north…

  Photo by Kelly Sikkema / UnsplashJem Bendell is a known scholar on societal collapse who rose to prominence in 2018 with his academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy…

And these things, that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting, they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” The author of twenty-fi…

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel / Unsplash What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our…

As a reviewer who is fluent in both English and Russian, I approach the reading of such works as Alexander Veytsman’s «Демография дремлющих душ» / A Succession of Somnolent Souls (‎Im Press/M…

Photo by Carolina Garcia Tavizon on Unsplash When Manuel Ulacia drowned at the age of forty-eight in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico near Ixtapa-Zihuatenejo in 2001 (pulled out to sea by a…

Courtesy of oscarhokeah.com Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin, 2022) begins with a family tree. Names are stitched together, threading out four generations of a family. T…

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash Do you get jabbed by a question that seemingly appears ceaseless? Bob Dylan’s song “Watching the River Flow” hints at a matter bound to raise a query. The point is: …

Photo by Kari Gunter-Seymour / www.karigunterseymourpoet.com “So much here depends” begins a line in a poem from Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new collection, alone in the house of my h…

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.—Octavio Paz This quote aptly fits an anthology I came across that goes by the title Converse: Contempora…

Through the lens of a notorious murder case, Italian writer Nicola Lagioia paints a grim portrait of the city of Rome and its “desperate” youth and explores the reasons why ordinary people do mon…

Photo by Lee Winder / Flickr According to Christian Authier, himself a prizewinning novelist and recently the author of Houellebecq politique (Flammarion, 2022), Michel Houellebecq is “uncon…

Shadab Zeest Hashmi I first met Shadab Zeest Hashmi at AWP in March 2019, when we both participated in a panel of Pakistani American poets writing in English. On a rainy night, she and her sons came…

Photo by Rhett Wesley / Unsplash Contemporary femininity promises power to those who secure the public gaze by going viral on YouTube. But what does it mean to be visible in this particular way? How…

Photo by www.Florida-Guidebook.com / Unsplash In memory of José Vázquez Amaral “Movement, I want to show, is something that multilingual writing and translation have in common. Both are flui…

Written by one of Russia’s best-known horror writers, Anna Starobinets, Look at Him (Three String Books, 2020) is an unusual book: it reads partly as a memoir and partly as a journalistic in…

Photo by Daniel on Unsplash Readers will naturally and, perhaps, unfortunately, wish to make connections between Sayaka Murata’s (b. 1979) newest novel, Earthlings, translated by Ginny Taple…

Photo by Milad Fakurian / Unsplash The largest collection in English of Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s work, Five Books (Bloodaxe, 2021) displays her lifelong project of expressing liberty an…

Photo by Yousef Espanioly on Unsplash Fahredin Shehu writes of Gili Haimovich’s Promised Lands (Finishing Line Press, 2020), “This book communicates globally giving more than a single book o…

Photo by Dominik Scythe / Unsplash A new book by a Nobel laureate and Booker award-winning author always brings with it a sense of trepidation. Will the new novel live up to the already established h…

Statue of renowned Kurdish historian, author, and poet Mastoureh Ardalan (1805–1848) in Erbil / Photo by Levi Meir Clancy / Unsplash Even though they appear to have a lot to say about the historical,…

Photo by Chris Wood / Flickr Houston’s Second Poet Laureate (2015–2017) and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2019, Robin Davidson is the author of three books of poetry: Kneeling…

  Antoine-François-Jean Claudet, [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52), daguerreotype, 2019.47, ​​​​​Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel / Courtesy of the Metr…

Pablo Neruda / Courtesy of the Nobel Foundation In his latest novel, Oh, maligna (Acantilado, 2019), Jorge Edwards (b. 1931, Santiago) pays homage to one of Chile’s most important literary i…

Leading up to the COP26 conference, in September 2021 several hundred protesters met in London’s Parliament Square before marching to the Home Office / Photo by Alisdare Hickson / Flickr “Our world i…