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…
Essays
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
