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Whether he is recounting his nighttime drive with a late colleague and poet around the beltway of the pulsing and vibrant São Paulo—a city so full of people and…
Book Reviews
October 11, 2021
August 19, 2021The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo by Steven Taylor / Flickr The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s first novel, is textually…
August 18, 2021A dizzying debut with something to say and a story to tell, David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts (Ecco, 2020) takes crime novel conventions and recasts them in a fresh, uniquely Native…
August 5, 2021Photo by Moheb Soliman / From the series Tidings / A Protocol of Circulation, Washing Up & Will In the Land of 10,000 Lakes, to which I recently relocated from the land of infinite s…
July 15, 2021César Aira / Photo by Nina Subin / Courtesy of New Directions A canonical writer of the fantastic and foundational modernista poet, the reactionary polymath Leopoldo Lugones (1874–19…
June 22, 2021Nasim Marashi’s recently released novel I’ll Be Strong for You (Paeez Fasl-e Akhar-e Sal Ast), translated by Poupeh Missaghi (Astra House, 2021), is a first-person fiction…
June 17, 2021Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing / Photo by Alex Berger / Flickr The year 2021 marks the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In April, the CCP released the latest…
June 9, 2021Our society is increasingly global, and the era of Covid-19 is no different. We may forget our localities and the importance of community in consuming the news and internet media. One city, the domain…
May 27, 2021Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer in the TV adaptation of A Discovery of Witches (2018) / IMDB Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy has taken a new life through the Sundance dramatic s…
May 26, 2021Ewa Lipska / Photo by Włodzimierz Wasyluk / Culture.pl Released shortly before the death of Adam Zagajewski, Ewa Lipska’s Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021…
May 24, 2021Background image: typescript of “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims,” by B. C Franklin / Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift…
May 11, 2021Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was shown as the premiere when the Forest Theatre in Gdańsk opened in 1911 / Photo by magro_kr / Flickr Anna Frajlich, who recently added to h…
April 28, 2021Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków / Photo by annaspies / Flickr Piotr Florczyk’s From the Annals of Kraków (Lynx House Press, 2020) narrates the searing realization of an almost…
February 3, 2021Photo by Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr The Gospel According to H. L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020) is an audacious book that foregrounds translation as a means of critiquing…
January 11, 2021If Serbian poet and novelist Zvonko Karanović were a painter, he would be a surrealist. In the forty-one dark prose poems of Sleepwalkers on a Picnic, in English and Serbian parallel texts…
December 16, 2020Margarita Liberaki Three Summers Trans. Karen Van Dyck NYRB Three Summers begins with a mystery. Katerina’s absent grandmother is an enigma to her family. Katerina fixates on t…
December 7, 2020Sonia Nimr / Source: TAMER Institute for Community Education This whirlwind adventure begins with protagonist Qamar’s birth and follows her life along the titular wondrous journeys aroun…
October 27, 2020Mikhal Dekel / Photo by Nina Subin Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (Norton, 2019), Mikhal Dekel’s outstanding book, is many things: a memoir, a family genealogy,…
October 14, 2020Helene Tursten An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good Soho Crime Trans. Marlaine Delargy I first picked up Swedish writer Helene Tursten’s collection of stories for its title and for its leng…
October 6, 2020Lesley M.M. Blume / Photo © Oberto Gili / Courtesy of HMH Books “The opportunity to learn from history’s tragedies has not yet passed.”—Lesley Blume Released on the seventy…
September 17, 2020Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection of flash, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), is a journey through desire’s relationship with the body: the exhaustion a…
August 17, 2020The tagline (or, in some cases, subtitle) of David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire reads simply: “A woman in trouble.” Of course, if you’ve seen that movie, it’s about a lot more than that,…
July 29, 2020What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection. John Willis’s Mni Wiconi / Water Is Li…
July 2, 2020Photo by Ben Hershey / Unsplash John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season (Doubl…
June 30, 2020Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice…
Recent Posts
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In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable…
Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) transcended cultural boundaries to become a global environmental parable. This essay explores the…
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Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it…
The year 2025 has been a remarkable one for French writer Marc Alyn (b. 1937). First, La Rumeur libre published his three-volume collected works…
Not nearly enough writers are translators, but all translators are writers. (And novelists and poets and essayists and playwrights and memoirists.)…
