Photo courtesy of the author
Leana Brunson-McClain grew up in the heart of Santa Monica’s Black community during its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Brunson lore, the family moved to San…
Interviews
Photo by Mark Carrel / Stock.adobe.com. The idea of reparations for slavery—a polarizing topic—continues to gain traction in US society. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 18 percent o…
Photo of Areva Martin with Section 14 Survivors / Courtesy of Areva Martin Palm Springs, California, an affluent desert community one hundred miles east of Los Angeles, is known for tourism and for…
Carolyne and Bill Edwards founded the Alfred T. Quinn Research Center in 2019 to document the history of Santa Monica’s Black community for future generations. The…
Photo of Robert Seethaler by Urban Zintel In February, Europa Editions published Katy Derbyshire’s English translation of Robert Seethaler’s eighth novel, The Café with No Name. The novel…
The facts of Dinaw Mengestu’s biography hardly break the surface of the writer’s vision of what it means to be in a place but not of it. In a 2024 Time magazine essay, Mengestu describes hims…
Photo of Devika Rege by Aruna Malinda Devika Rege’s novel Quarterlife (Liveright, 2024) is populated with millennials who are discovering who they are and what they’re for in what is sometimes cal…
Photo of Zahid Rafiq by Muzamil Mattoo In December 2024 Tin House published Zahid Rafiq’s debut short-story collection, The World with Its Mouth Open. In these eleven stories from Kashmir, ordinar…
Thórdís Helgadóttir is an Icelandic poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Her work has earned the prestigious Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör poetry prize and a nomination for the Icelandic Lite…
Bearing Witness: In his ongoing column, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. Tens of thousands of American…
Photo by Yousef Khanfar Mahmoud Shukair is not only enlightening the Arab world on Palestine, he is enlightening the world on themselves. —Yousef Khanfar, founder of the Palestine Prize Foun…
Photo of Praveen Herat by Candice Nechitch In Praveen Herat’s debut novel, Between This World and the Next (Restless Books, 2024), a British war photographer uncovers crime and corruption in a Cam…
Photo by Isabel Wagemann Mariana Enriquez is the uncrowned queen of new Latin American neogothic horror. She launches the classic horror feels, such as fear and disgust, into the twenty-first cent…
Oyamada in front of Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome / Photo by Takeo Nakaoku Rea Amit: Hiroko, many consider you to be a representative of contemporary Japanese fiction. While you clearly write in the Ja…
Photo of Timothy Schaffert by Michael Lionstar I had coffee with one of Nebraska’s bookbinders a few months ago. A meeting I remember with gratitude. A gifted workman, Kevin started his caree…
Photo courtesy of the author Set in a small Italian village in 1970, Maddalena Vaglio Tanet’s newly released debut novel, Untold Lessons (2024), tells the story of schoolteacher Silvia who, plague…
On September 17, 2024, Invisible Publishing will release Barrack Zailaa Rima’s graphic three-volume trilogy, Beirut, available in English for the first time in Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Tur…
Still from Loznitsa’s documentary The Invasion For three days in early March 2024, the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies at the University of Oklahoma hosted acclaimed Ukrainian film di…
Photo of Elif Shafak by Ferhat Elik In August, Knopf published Elif Shafak’s new novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky. In this story spanning centuries, three characters are connected by history, Th…
Megan McDowell is a leading English-language translator of fiction from Latin America. McDowell has worked with authors such as Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez, known for the use of bodily,…
Photo of Gabriel Bump by Andrew Russell In Gabriel Bump’s second novel, The New Naturals, people are seeking safety—safety from violence but also from the perils of capitalism, unsafe drinking wat…
Photo by Peny Delta Born in London in 1997, Andrej Al-Asadi is among the foremost young poets writing in Macedonian today. In a conversation with Peter Constantine, he discusses his multicultural…
Photo of Mircea Cărtărescu courtesy of Deep Vellum In the world we live in, there are things that happen and things that should have occurred according to the simplest and most basic systems of na…
Photo of Holocaust survivor Eva Weyl speaking to a young participant at the BVB-Lernzentrum in Dortmund / Christina Walther Bearing Witness: In his ongoing column, Karlos K. Hill highligh…
Artist Fitore Berisha Alísdóttir is an Albanian woman from Kosova who now divides her time between Kosova and Iceland. Her work exposes and condemns human-rights violations. Here, Eralda L. Lameborshi…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
