Sonoko MachidaThe Convenience Store by the SeaTrans. Bruno NavaskyNarrated by Yuriri NakaPenguin Audio, 2025I recently had the pleasure of listening to the newly released aud…
Essays
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…
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 courtesy of IMDb Comparing the novel Spaceman of Bohemia to its film adaptation, Spaceman, the author relates the arcs of Czech history and Adam Sandler’s career, findin…
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 by Yashima Gakutei from the Monkey King Songokū, from the Chinese novel Journey to the West / Wikimedia Commons While the Monkey King’s on-screen presence in Sinners is…
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…- September is World Kid Lit Month, a time to step beyond our familiar reading borders and explore horizons new. Here are four middle-grade novels and a picture book from five continents: a globe-tr…
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…
Illustration by poharytska / Stock.adobe.com Eight reviewers in search of an author . . . or themselves. The StockistWhat can be more predi…
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…
The author describes how a “heady concoction” of East Asian cinematic stories inspired his own work as a storyteller.As a young adult, Chinese-language films became something of a lifeline to…
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…
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 of Han Kang by Paik Dahuim / Courtesy of Natur & Kultur Like a clutch of words strewn over white paper. Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. Turning to look behind me,…
Photo of Kaesong city center, North Korea by Herr Loeffler / Stock.adobe.com What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? F…
Digital illustration by Emily Holson, Trapped in Surveillance (2024). Reminding us that “freedom is a muscle,” a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose own Drum Dream Girl…
Photo of India’s Independence Day, New Delhi / Alamy.com Following the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to rev…
The Chernihiv Theater was partially destroyed by a Russian missile strike in August 2023. Photo by Oliver Raw Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, and despite the fact…
Village scene in Santiniketan / Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr In a country where wanting to remain rural is a choice now only available to the wealthy, what does rural mean? Here, Sumana Roy conte…
The Cemetery Mártires del 19 de Julio / Wikimedia In 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…
Photo by Mistervlad / Stock.adobe.com An Argentine in Stockholm marvels over the Swedish language and Sweden’s culture.The first time I ever heard Swedish spoken was on a visit to Stockhol…
Photo of the village of Oia by Baret Magarian Though Santorini is a place where the sensory gets top billing, it’s an island of sweeping contrasts. After an extended stay, Baret Magarian explor…