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…
Essays
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…
Photo of fry bread courtesy of the author Desperately wanting to find a space to further her relationship with Native American food culture, a writer travels to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, thinking it…
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…
Photo of Once Quarter, Buenos Aires by Jordi Camí / Alamy.com Visiting the Jewish neighborhood of Once, a writer finds herself caught between a desire to escape the internet and a need to connect…
Photo of Stadio Diego Armando Maradona by Stefano Tammaro / Stock.adobe.com Reflecting on his love of football, Oliverio Coelho has an epiphany: some players on the pitch stand out, not just…
Photo by travelview / Stock.adobe.com Take a whirling tour of Buenos Aires’s secondhand bookstores and meet an array of eccentric reader types with porteño writer Matías Serra Bradford. A ci…
Photo by nickalbi / Stock.adobe.com In 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 ta…
Photo of monument to Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky by abs0lute / Stock.adobe.com Against increasing calls to “cancel” Dostoevsky due to the Russian nationalism espoused in his wr…
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…
Photo by Ella Ivanescu / Unsplash.com Climate change, resource depletion, extreme weapons, AI, and more: Richard Heinberg looks at the individual threats composing the unprecedented convergence of…
Photo of Sandra Day O'Connor by Yousef Khanfar / www.yousefkhanfar.com Photographer Yousef Khanfar recalls his time with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in this tribute to the first female justice of…
Photo by Shevaun Williams | shevaunwilliams.com After accepting the NSK silver medallion, certificate, and a check symbolizing the $35,000 award, Gene Luen Yang delivered a heartwarming story abou…
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’Hare What are the three ancient Irish sports and how have they played a role in Irish history? Find out this and more in Mr…
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…
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…
Photo courtesy of author A 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…
December 17, 2025
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October 21, 2025
