Black beachgoers Verna Deckard and Arthur Lewis pictured in front of a fence demarcating Santa Monica’s whites-only Club Casa Del Mar. Blacks were relegated to a small roped-off area known as the Ba…
Essays
Photo by Great Brut Here / Stock.adobe.com In his plea for the planet, in which “humans understand themselves as a harmonious part of the Earth, neither more nor less than other animals, plants…
Photo by Andrew Lam The author’s childhood ended, more or less, on the beach of Vung Tau, Vietnam, “where magic and prayers failed.” In this lyric essay, he returns to the scene as a double ref…
Photo by Shevaun Williams Ananda 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 t…
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 literat…
Photo of Port-Louis by joël BEHR / Stock.adobe.com In this essay by Devi’s principal English-language translator, he asks: When will we stop reducing Devi to the labels of Mauritian writer, Indian…
Photo by Shevaun Williams It 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 toget…
Photo by Shevaun Williams As 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…
Photo 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,…
Photo of Kaesong city center, North Korea by Herr Loeffler / Stock.adobe.com What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? F…
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…
Photo of India’s Independence Day, New Delhi / Alamy.com Following the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to rev…
The Chernihiv Theater was partially destroyed by a Russian missile strike in August 2023. Photo by Oliver Raw Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, and despite the fact…
Village scene in Santiniketan / Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr In a country where wanting to remain rural is a choice now only available to the wealthy, what does rural mean? Here, Sumana Roy conte…
The Cemetery Mártires del 19 de Julio / Wikimedia In 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…
Shizue Ogawa pays particular attention to the resonances between Western and Eastern culture that inspire her philosophical, aesthetic, and cosmic reflections. Here, Alice-Catherine Carl…
Uemura Shōen (1875–1949), Snow / Wikimedia Commons Though it’s impossible to say which generation of Japanese women writers has had a larger influence on literature domestically and inter…
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.com An American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns. In my earnest Ohio ac…
Illustration by Abigail Larson, Something Wrong?, ink, watercolor, digital media, 2023 Discussions of horror fiction often begin with attempts at a definition. Questions like “what is ‘ho…
Photo of Imbros by Yakup Ahmet Baran / Stock.adobe.com The Turkish island of Imbros represents a historical anomaly of Mediterranean geopolitics. Matt A. Hanson traces the tenacious attempt by…
Photo of Wole Soyinka by the author Inspired 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…
Photo of Chihuahuan Desert, Contrabando Area ~ Big Bend Ranch State Park by Gary Nored / flickr.com Can we tell stories, the author asks, “in a way that makes more breathing room, that does no…
Photo of bus route in Buenos Aires by Carolina Jaramillo / Stock.adobe.com Taking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own. Around 2008 I made the unlikely deci…
Photo of LGBTQ Pride March in Buenos Aires by Ari / Stock.adobe.com Each November, Buenos Aires’s Pride march proceeds down a ten-block stretch that is the “spine of Argentine history,” fulfilling…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
