Photo by Shevaun WilliamsAnanda Devi’s principal English-language champion makes a case that “publishing Devi is an act of resistance, of amplifying a voice, an entire nation and population that h…
Essays
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…
Photo of Port-Louis by joël BEHR / Stock.adobe.comIn this essay by Devi’s principal English-language translator, he asks: When will we stop reducing Devi to the labels of Mauritian writer, Indian Ocea…
Photo by Shevaun WilliamsIt is perhaps not a coincidence—or else it is a very felicitous one—that, in the very same month of my receiving the Neustadt Prize, my first and last books came out together…
Photo by Shevaun WilliamsAs 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 Octob…
Photo of Han Kang by Paik Dahuim / Courtesy of Natur & KulturLike a clutch of words strewn over white paper. Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. Turning to look behind me, I sa…
Photo of Kaesong city center, North Korea by Herr Loeffler / Stock.adobe.comWhat literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? From Gone…
Digital illustration by Emily Holson, Trapped in Surveillance (2024).Reminding us that “freedom is a muscle,” a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose own Drum Dream Girl has b…
Photo of India’s Independence Day, New Delhi / Alamy.comFollowing the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to revisit…
The Chernihiv Theater was partially destroyed by a Russian missile strike in August 2023. Photo by Oliver RawDespite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, and despite the fact he i…
Village scene in Santiniketan / Photo by Eric Parker / FlickrIn a country where wanting to remain rural is a choice now only available to the wealthy, what does rural mean? Here, Sumana Roy contemplat…
The Cemetery Mártires del 19 de Julio / WikimediaIn these chronicles of funeral workers in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, families gather in a cemetery the size of fifty soccer fields to try to ac…
Shizue Ogawa pays particular attention to the resonances between Western and Eastern culture that inspire her philosophical, aesthetic, and cosmic reflections. Here, Alice-Catherine Carls offer…
Uemura Shōen (1875–1949), Snow / Wikimedia CommonsThough it’s impossible to say which generation of Japanese women writers has had a larger influence on literature domestically and internatio…
It is an undisputed fact that women played an integral role in the development of modern Japanese literature. As early as the late nineteenth century, Ichiyō Higuchi broke through the literary establi…
Photo by Mathias Reding / Unsplash.comAn American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns. In my earnest Ohio accent o…
Illustration by Abigail Larson, Something Wrong?, ink, watercolor, digital media, 2023Discussions of horror fiction often begin with attempts at a definition. Questions like “what is ‘horror’…
Photo of Imbros by Yakup Ahmet Baran / Stock.adobe.comThe Turkish island of Imbros represents a historical anomaly of Mediterranean geopolitics. Matt A. Hanson traces the tenacious attempt by the…
Photo of Wole Soyinka by the authorInspired by a photo and the histories connected to it, a writer makes a film to mark Wole Soyinka’s ninetieth year. The photo of a young man of thirty-five, on the f…
Photo of Chihuahuan Desert, Contrabando Area ~ Big Bend Ranch State Park by Gary Nored / flickr.comCan we tell stories, the author asks, “in a way that makes more breathing room, that does not cru…
Photo of bus route in Buenos Aires by Carolina Jaramillo / Stock.adobe.comTaking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own. Around 2008 I made the unlikely decision t…
Photo of LGBTQ Pride March in Buenos Aires by Ari / Stock.adobe.comEach November, Buenos Aires’s Pride march proceeds down a ten-block stretch that is the “spine of Argentine history,” fulfilling Eva…
Photo of Once Quarter, Buenos Aires by Jordi Camí / Alamy.comVisiting the Jewish neighborhood of Once, a writer finds herself caught between a desire to escape the internet and a need to connect as sh…
Photo of Stadio Diego Armando Maradona by Stefano Tammaro / Stock.adobe.comReflecting on his love of football, Oliverio Coelho has an epiphany: some players on the pitch stand out, not just for their…
Photo by travelview / Stock.adobe.comTake a whirling tour of Buenos Aires’s secondhand bookstores and meet an array of eccentric reader types with porteño writer Matías Serra Bradford. A cinema transf…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
