Photo 1 - Educational Bookshop‘s current storefront. Photo 2 - Customers browse inside the Educational Bookshop. Photo 3 - The Bookshop’s reading events routinely draw packed audiences. Photo 4 - A la…
Varia
Photo by Feodor Chistyakov / Unsplash.com The image of the translator is often that of the lonely, intrepid soul working endless hours, accompanied only by stacks of books, but our columnist th…
hoto of Oaxacan parade by victorfotomx / Stock.adobe.com Our guide, Ayumi, is wrapping up a three-hour walking tour of the Mexican city of Oaxaca when she grins and says, “And my final advice is: i…
Photo of Liberty Books at Peregrine Farmstall Tiny bookstores are thriving across South Africa. J. L. Powers offers a guided tour of some of her favorites.As the Atlantic Ocean gives…
The “Open Book” of Odysseus ElytisElytis served on the 1972 Neustadt Prize jury, which chose Gabriel García Márquez for the award. His nominee was the French writer Claude Simon.…
Xalapa is the capital of the eastern state of Veracruz and home to one of the richest treasures of Mexico’s Gulf Coast Mesoamerican heritage: the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa. Opened in 1986, the M…
Illustration by ilbusca / iStock.com Veronica Esposito looks at the strangely fascinating imagery authors have used to describe self-translation and the battle between two languages, from Jhump…
The Alley of Writers. Photo by Farhodjon Chinberdiev / Unsplash.com You see a lot from a train window, and after a few days of railing through Uzbekistan, I detected a nationwide fondness for ceram…
Especially in winter, but in all seasons, a handful of poetry collections, within arm’s length, reach out to me. I find myself returning to these more frequently than others, for some…
A Review of The Indian Literatures of Today: A Symposium, by Bharatan Kumarappa (International Book House, 1947)“This volume contains sixteen addresses which give short résumés of the histori…
The editors are delighted to announce that the following books received the most votes in our writers’ and readers’ poll, in descending order:Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear…
Photos courtesy of the Old Bookstore / flateyribookstore.com Flateyri welcomed me in the late afternoon, the daylight already giving way to those delicate northern blues that stretch across the Wes…
In spring 2021 the editors invited twenty-one writers to nominate a single book, published since the year 2000, that had had a major influence on their own work. We published the longlist…
Photo by kiwisoul / Stock.adobe.com In Almaty, people read everywhere, bookstores are plentiful, and the Kazakh language, engaged in a “lingual fracas” with Russian, is reasserting itself.…
Photo of New York City by Kevin / Stock.adobe.com What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel th…
Tranströmer receiving the Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma in 1990 A Review of Tomas Tranströmer’s Tolkningar (Bonniers, 1999)“When Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), one of Sweden…
In Almaty, people read everywhere, bookstores are plentiful, and the Kazakh language, engaged in a “lingual fracas” with Russian, is reasserting itself. In central Almaty, in a leafy park off Gogol S…
To reach Nuria, you must traverse the crowded streets of central Nairobi, dodging motorcycles and weaving in and out of traffic. From the street, you’ll enter Bazaar Plaza—a large, stone-gra…
Photo of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town by ilyas Ayub / Alamy.com Taking the measure of Cape Town’s many contradictions, a visiting writer also discerns its manifold richness. One morning, twenty-four…
Illustration by William Wallace Denslow from The Wizard of Oz, 1900 / Wikimedia Our columnist looks at the smallest language on earth—both deliberately simple and full of ambiguity—and…
Norwegian speculative fiction is making its way into English in ever greater numbers as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. What makes this particularly exciting is that the four authors fue…
According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the period July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024, there were more than ten thousand instances of bans in US schools where students’ access to…
A review of Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Samuel Putnam (Viking, 1949) Don Quixote is the most frequently translated book in the history of literature [but], claims Mr. Putnam, has remained for En…
Photo by Parker Buske Once an icon in the literary district of Cornhill, Boston, Brattle Book Shop now fits snugly near downtown, a few paces from the Common. Hidden off Tremont, and down West Str…
Photo of Dust Breeding, by Man Ray, ca. 1920, by Liquid Liquid / Flickr.com Our columnist looks back through the centuries to rekindle our fascination with dust. Using the word itself as…