We asked Ming Di to take a look at how US poets have been reviewed in China for the past decade. The results provide a window into what reviewers are seeing in US poets’ work and which poets are m…
Essays
Photo by Yury Nam / Unsplash.com The owner of a small, independent press considers the role of book reviews in getting books into readers’ hands.In March, Publishers Weekly—one of…
Photo by lucadp / Stock.adobe.com A longtime publisher of books in translation—and reviewer of translations who reads some one hundred translations a year—offers some best practices for reviewi…
Photo courtesy of Fotografía de autor desconocido., Public domain / Wikimedia Commons How do book reviews affect writers—for better, for worse, not at all? After receiving few and most…
Still courtesy of IMDb What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing…
A writer and his family become part of the modern saga of displacement and find themselves among a menagerie of companions.As we left the house, our panting was so loud, it sounded like the h…
Photo by Abdel Hakeem After seeking safety in Cairo, relentless questions remain: Is there a return? Will hunger haunt my children again?The journey of survival was never ordinary—it was a…
Photo by Emad Nassar A writer living in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza faces great loss with no way to say goodbye.When writing about Gaza, one must purify the pen seven times, one time with…
Photo by Abed Rahman A writer in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza contemplates the many losses across multiple displacements and what the destruction wrought on Gaza says about the nature of t…
Photo by Haneen Salem Before burning them, a writer reads through his diaries to recall disappointments, failed love stories, and the details of ordinary relationships.Whenever I think bac…
Photo by Fadi Thabet I have chosen to carry my camera and pen instead of guns, to tell my story and promote peace around the world; I believe peace is a finer horse…
Daulet Zhanshin / Photo by Dmitry Zimnitsky Myth lives on in Central Asia, but it has changed shape. Through multimedia projects, audiences become participants in rituals rather than mere parti…
Guadalupe Nettel (left) and Rosalind Harvey alternated reading Nettel’s keynote in Spanish and English / Photo by Michelle Johnson Rosalind Harvey presented an earlier version of this…
Blurring the Interspecies Divide: Eeb Allay Ooo! and Multispecies Cohabitation in Anthropocene Delhi
From Eeb Allay Ooo! / Courtesy of the director Disclaimer: This essay and my accompanying interview with Prateek Vats reveal crucial plot details about the film.Eeb Allay Ooo!…
Photo from the Extinct? series by Ravi Agarwal / raviagarwal.com / Reproduced by permission of the artist It is a truth universally acknowledged that Bombay is the spiritual home for India…
Photo of Saless Bookstore, Tehran by Sepideh Nazaralizadeh Many years ago, in the old days of dial-up internet, when I was still living in Iran, I would spend time reading book reviews online, maki…
In this review-essay, Laura Pensa considers Las niñas del naranjel, a historical fiction that is also intimate, deviant, and populated by other presences. Newly translated into English by…
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…
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…
