Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author
Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay.
Born in 1956…
Essay
March 8, 2022
March 8, 2022Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr Berlin poet, essayist, and playwright Esther Dischereit responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the shelling near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi Germ…
February 28, 2022“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies,” Roberto Bolaño, who enjoyed accruing enemies in the pantheon of Latin American letters, writes in the short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (…
February 24, 2022Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today. In Pavl…
February 2, 2022Photo by Miko Guziuk / Unsplash In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan…
January 3, 2022Photo by simpleinsomnia / Flickr If men and women reappraise the stories of masculinity they’ve received in texts by male authors, we all might better understand the stories we have.…
December 8, 2021Gurnah received the Nobel Prize medal and diploma from the Swedish ambassador on December 6 © Nobel Prize Outreach / Photo by Hugh Fox Earlier this week, Abdulrazak Gurnah received t…
October 20, 2021Photo by Eileen Pan / Unsplash “Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an…
August 17, 2021Postcard for One City One Book Hong Kong 2020, which featured Xi Xi’s My City The Shanghai-born Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (b. 1937) was the 2019 winner of the Newman Prize…
July 29, 2021Photo by Jason Kocheran / Unsplash A left-behind daughter of the Philippines reflects on her mother’s honorable sacrifice: leaving her family behind to support them while working abroad.…
July 14, 2021Photo by Rodion Kutsaev / Unsplash When I met Emmanuel Carrère in 2014, I had one question for him. I was sent by the magazine I worked for at the time to interview him at a literary festival…
July 13, 2021Sylvia Petter recalls Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker, who passed away June 4, not long after the book-themed TV series ÜBER featured her in its first episode. Friederike May…
July 7, 2021Photos by Mai Al-Nakib / Courtesy of the author Civilizations, empires, dynasties, and monarchies end, leaving behind ruins of their fabled splendor. Traces of achievements become more or les…
March 24, 2021Poet and teacher K Za Win (1982–2021) / Photo courtesy of the author When I last visited Myanmar in 2013, it was to participate in the Irrawaddy Festival to launch Bones Will Crow: 15 Con…
March 23, 2021Beirut; Credit: George Azar A writer reflects on her relationship to home in Beirut. Why the windows of the room did not shatter from the August 4 explosion is still a mystery. The…
February 18, 2021Photo by Tyler Quiring / Unsplash Ismail Kadare has a remarkable quality of saying a great deal and with much clarity, but in an elusive, oblique, and allegorical way. Peter Constantine s…
October 13, 2020Detail from Glück’s letter to the author / Courtesy of the author In a tribute to her teacher being named the 2020 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a past prot…
September 30, 2020To mark the upcoming 2020 Neustadt Lit Fest and the announcement of the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, here is an excerpt featuring the children’s and young…
July 29, 2020Photo by Carlos Lechuga Translator’s note: On July 16, 2020, the Cuban government announced a set of economic reforms that includes the immediate rescission of the 10 percent surcharge on…
July 20, 2020From the Family Album A writer born in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir reflects on how his older brother must have felt once the freedom to roam the apricot grove and streets of the…
July 17, 2020Photo courtesy of the author Judging an English Olympiad in Kyrgyzstan, the author witnesses her native tongue “being sliced and slivered like a summer melon” while the…
January 7, 2020Adapted from a photo by Jake weirick on Unsplash Like a dead pop star, Susan Sontag left behind a lot of fans who claim they knew her. After the release last September of Benja…
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