Alice-Catherine Carls offers a career-spanning overview of the work of Polish writer Anna Frajlich.A few weeks after having been expelled from Poland on November 12, 1969, Anna Frajlich…
Essay
October 17, 2025
October 14, 2025Looking at the work of three writers—Han Kang, Mariana Enríquez, and Margaret Atwood—Catalina Infante Beovic finds stories that allow readers to freely exorcize the fears inherent to our times.…
October 7, 2025Photo of Fereshteh Molavi by Pari Riahi In Thirty Shadow Birds (2019), Fereshteh Molavi constructs a literary landscape where diasporic identity is neither fixed nor nostalgic but ref…
September 30, 2025The author pays tribute to the prolific Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, best known as a leftist writer who began his career in the 1960s, during the reign of President Nasser.When I first m…
September 24, 2025Artwork by Arya Gopi / Courtesy of the artist The first word I ever spoke was not recorded in any baby book, captured on video, or celebrated with fanfare. It emerged, as all first words do, from t…
September 3, 2025When migrants must perform gratitude to be believed, what happens to their truth? Dina Nayeri’s memoir disrupts the tidy refugee story, turning contradiction into resistance and the in-between int…
August 29, 2025Photo by DW labs / Adobe Stock In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable,” Ferdinando Camon has given writers like Patrick…
August 27, 2025Photo by Heiko / Stock.adobe.com Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and…
August 25, 2025The year 2025 has been a remarkable one for French writer Marc Alyn (b. 1937). First, La Rumeur libre published his three-volume collected works, totaling nearly 1,500 pages. On March 27, during…
August 19, 2025If Palestinian literature is truly a literature of exile—one that focuses on memory and redeeming the geography and lives shattered in 1948—the Six-Day War in 1967 brought about a different tradition…
August 12, 2025This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungarian author Miklós Vámos’s most successful work, Apák könyve (2000; The Book of Fathers, 2006). In this essay from the…
July 16, 2025Albert Cossery / Courtesy of New Directions The end of June marked the anniversary of the death of Albert Cossery (1913–2008), a French-speaking Egyptian writer who is not particularly famous, but…
June 17, 2025Nigerian writer, editor, and scholar Chibueze Darlington Anuonye’s pioneering essay on contemporary Nigerian poetry, “Facebook Writers: The Emergence of a New Generation of Nigerian Writers,” was rece…
May 8, 2025Tjeerd Braat / Unsplash.com Olga Zilberbourg discovers the flora of the United States Botanic Garden—the oldest living forced migrants to the US—and a Russian writer…
May 6, 2025Kwame Dawes / Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts Kwame Dawes, who was until recently the Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner, served the magazine for thirteen years. He broug…
April 23, 2025Photo by pink candy / Adobe Stock The following is adapted from the editor’s note introducing What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays on Immigration, now out from Restle…
April 4, 2025Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland / Photo by Sean Kuriyan / Unsplash What does it mean to be a Northern Irish writer? Decades after the end of the Troubles, it remains a difficult…
March 27, 2025Ukraine Right Now, a poster by seventeen-year-old artist Polina Pustovit from Zaporizhzhia, which is undergoing daily attacks / Courtesy of the artist Ukrainians are fighting for their…
March 5, 2025Photo by THP Creative / Adobe Stock The author weighs the benefit of grammar guides’ standardization of language against their history of neglecting the language of underprivileged groups, comp…
February 27, 2025Kwame Dawes courtesy of Blue Flower Arts “It is evident,” writes Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, “that the combination of Kwame Dawes’s bicontinental heritage and love for his father and family has…
February 26, 2025Photo by Igne B / Unsplash The author explores some common issues in translation and how they might affect translation of queer texts. Moving away from purely theoretical discussions, the…
January 27, 2025Photo by DRasa / Adobe Stock This somber but inventive essay was adapted from an address Edith Bruck gave in 2018, and as the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the eightie…
December 6, 2024Photo of Han Kang by Paik Dahuim / Courtesy of Natur & Kultur Like a clutch of words strewn over white paper. Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. Turning to look behind me,…
March 19, 2024Photo by Christopher Michel / Flickr Feng Jicai looks into the life of Parisians and their unique “street kiss” culture. He is mesmerized by the affection that they share unapologetically, in…
March 13, 2024A writer considers home as she remembers her partner of fifty-one years. I was born in Vienna and grew up in Australia. We didn’t speak German at home. My parents were “new” Australians for…
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