Photo by Reiseuhu and Katia De Juan / Unsplash.com
Literature can change the way we celebrate. The bull-running and fighting of Spain’s San Fermin festival was just a local affair before Hemingway…
Varia
No sense can be made of the unspeakable horrors and injustices Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to over the course of the last few months—to say nothing of the last century.…
Photos of Handley Cellars Painted Mural at the AV Historical Museum courtesy of Courtney DeGraff / Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association / avwines.com In her column for this issue, Veronica…
“This article began with a zombie. Had it not been for the zombie, I wouldn’t have opened the way I did, nor said what I am about to say, nor compared what I am about to compare. I would have written…
Photos by Laura Hernandez Nestled on a quiet street in the Cordón neighborhood of Montevideo, Uruguay, is Escaramuza, a combination bookstore, café, and cultural events center. With ornate tile fl…
As a tween, I was solely allowed to read whatever was “true”; stories found in nonfiction historical narratives, biographies, zoography, and travelogues. While the emotional truths one finds in fictio…
Photo by Jacob Boomsma / istockphoto.com In the Toronto airport, a young woman moved her bag from a seat so that someone might sit down. “You can sit here, eh. I’m from Brandon, in ‘Friendly Manit…
Photo of Kim Yuna, courtesy of UPI / Alamy Stock Photo / Molly Riley Is this idea of mass frustration distinctly Korean, or is it more international in scope? In her ongoing column on untranslata…
Photo of the Wales Millennium Centre / Jonny Gios / Unsplash.com Hear the seagulls? They carouse all over the city, cawing about the places they’ve been beyond Wales. That’s always the way of it i…
“Between the political mentality and the pure intellect there are inevitable differences. The political mind seeks to dominate the relative or the accidental, as the navigator, expert in winds and the…
Photo courtesy of the Cheikh Bookstore There are very few historical bookstores to be found in Algeria, and one of them is the Cheikh Bookstore (Librairie Cheikh) located in Tizi…
Photo by Javier Santos Guzmán on Unsplash Speeding on a packed rush-hour Metrobus from La Bombilla (Lightbulb) station for Chilpancingo (Wasp), I suddenly imagined myself as one of countless urban…
Photo by Rodrigo Jardón Jazmina Barrera’s first novel, Cross-Stitch, translated by Christina MacSweeney, is an engrossing story of three friends as they come of age in Mexico City and while travel…
Photo by Angela Blankenship In Etaf Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, a young Palestinian American artist and mother of two contends with the effects of intergenerational trauma and her complicated re…
Maysaloun Faraj, The Orange, 2002. Four artists of Iraqi descent are achieving global recognition for their paintings and handbag design. Both proud of their culture of origin and open…
While working on a new verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I discovered that skepticism toward my project tended to follow a specific trajectory. People who began with perhaps too much faith in…
Photo courtesy of Castle Rock Entertainment / RGR Collection / Alamy Stock Photo From the Middle Ages to Seinfeld, schlemiel and schlimazel characters enjoy an interesting history. Veronica Esposi…
Arpino, Cicero’s birthplace, is about 100 kilometers southeast of Rome. These studies [of literature] are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comf…
Photo courtesy of Green Feather Books Spring in Oklahoma can be unpredictable, with sweltering heat, severe storms, and even cold snaps. With continual changes in the weather, you…
Javier Fuentes’s debut novel, Countries of Origin, finds pastry chef Demetrio leaving the US and returning to his birth country, Spain. On the flight to Madrid, he meets Jacobo, which begins a will-th…
Dolores and Walter Neustadt in 2014 | Photo by Shevaun Williams The World Literature Today organization and the University of Oklahoma have lost a dear friend. Dolores K. (Dottie) Neustad…
See something once, and you see it everywhere. In Quito’s old town it was geraniums: on the curly-whirly balconies, in the porticoes of the old baroque buildings, and the great open squares, there wer…
Prince Shakur When They Tell You to Be Good Tin House This debut memoir made many best-of-fall lists and won the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award. Shakur’s memoir charts his political coming of age,…
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817), oil on canvas, 119.5 x 99.5 x 9 cm bpk Bildagentur / Hamburger Kunsthalle, SHK / Elke Walford / Art Resource, NY What is sehns…
Photos courtesy of the author It’s a long way from Manhattan Island to King George Island—actually, it’s an epic trip from anywhere to Antarctica—and the wise traveler needs to make a stop, prefer…