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…
Essays
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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’…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Photo by nickalbi / Stock.adobe.comIn any discussion of Buenos Aires, it’s probably useful to start out by defining our parameters. For the rest of the world, “Buenos Aires” conjures images of tango d…
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Photo of monument to Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky by abs0lute / Stock.adobe.comAgainst increasing calls to “cancel” Dostoevsky due to the Russian nationalism espoused in his writing…
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Photo of Lebanon by Patricia Abdallah / Unsplash.com“Through a sort of grating irony,” writes Charif Majdalani, Lebanon “remains a sort of model but in the negative sense of the term, because it conce…
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Photo by Ella Ivanescu / Unsplash.comClimate change, resource depletion, extreme weapons, AI, and more: Richard Heinberg looks at the individual threats composing the unprecedented convergence of risk…
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Photo of Sandra Day O'Connor by Yousef Khanfar / www.yousefkhanfar.comPhotographer Yousef Khanfar recalls his time with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in this tribute to the first female justice of the U…
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Photo by Shevaun Williams | shevaunwilliams.comAfter accepting the NSK silver medallion, certificate, and a check symbolizing the $35,000 award, Gene Luen Yang delivered a heartwarming story about the…
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Even though the Latin American novel was never the West’s “Other,” the new Handbook published by Oxford University Press does a marvelous job of producing a sorely needed remapping of the continent’s…
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Mural in the vicinity of Croke Park, Dublin / Photo by Damjana Mraović-O’HareWhat are the three ancient Irish sports and how have they played a role in Irish history? Find out this and more in Mraović…
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When reflecting on the experience of interviewing his own grandfather into his one hundredth year, Matt A. Hanson finds a kindred methodology in writer Michael Frank’s patience as he interviewed Holoc…
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Sona Jobarteh, the first woman to achieve an international profile playing the kora, is a singular figure in the pantheon of twenty-first-century African artists. Read Banning Eyre’s profile of her h…
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Photo courtesy of authorA refugee from the Bosnian War, Lana Spendl recalls family weekends in the country outside of Sarajevo: her friend with one cow, her grandmother’s garden, butterflies, and her…
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Photos by Yousef Khanfar | www.yousefkhanfar.comThe tears, the rituals: a family goes on a journey and joins millions of strangers pouring into Mecca. In this moving essay, a writer evokes the beauty,…