THE NOVELISTS Pat Barker and Douglas Stuart were both born into poverty, victims of the de-industrialization that swept like a wrecking ball through the British Isles during the…
Varia
IF YOU SEE this city for the first time, it may seem as if it has just sprung to life overnight, such is its chaotic charm; it sits atop an elevated earth at three thousand meters a…
THERE ARE SOME moments in life when, upon entering a room, you realize you have stumbled upon that disturbing border where passion rubs up against obsession. In Baku, Azerbaijan, th…
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about how much of my own writing resembles “correspondences,” as my friend calls it, whether being conversations with visual artists such as Agnes Martin or E…
View from the poet’s roof, Tumbalá, Chiapas / Photo by Carol Rose Little TO VIST THE Ch’ol poet Juana Peñate Montejo’s house in Chiapas, Mexico, requires several flights, at…
Hwang Sok-yong The Prisoner: A Memoir Trans. Sora Kim-Russell & Anton Hur Verso, 2021 Written by renowned Korean author and famous democracy activist Hwang So…
Manchester Cathedral, England “THE CITY CENTRE was at once beautiful and scary. . . . The infrastructure alone—of brick and stone—was forbidding. The skyline—d…
Evelyne Axell: Body Double, exhibition views, Muzeum Susch. Photo: Courtesy Muzeum Susch / Art Stations Foundation CH IT IS MY BIRTHDAY; I am seventy-one. I am celebrating w…
Kwon Yeo-sun Lemon Trans. Janet Hong Other Press LEMON BEGINS LIKE many crime dramas: someone’s been murdered and the police are interro…
I THINK I WILL FOREVER be just a little bit in love with young adult (YA) literature, no matter how old I get. While I’m not terribly discriminatory about genres, I do have ste…
THE FACT THAT Mehrnaz Shirazi Adl’s story “Anahita” has made it to English-language readers is, in itself, a bit of a miracle. Due to wide-reaching sanctions on Iran, here in the…
In the children’s market, very little is translated into English from languages beyond western Europe, and until very recently Korean children’s books, for all their vibrancy and stunning artwork,…
“African Renaissance Monument” by pennstatenews is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 LIKE A PILLOW that has burst its seams, Dakar overflows with an excess of life. The resultan…
IT WAS IN THE BATHROOMS of the Sanborns restaurant, near what is today the Somos Voces (We are voices) bookstore, where Adonis García, the hustler-protagonist of Luis Zapata’s now-c…
THE LATEST BOOK by environmental writer Richard Heinberg finds him working with familiar material but with a new and insightful twist. In Power (New Society, 2021), Heinberg…
Installation View at Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA, 2016 Wang Xiaosong’s essay unpacks the design philosophy of contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing’s major works. What is notable…
Photo © Keiko Onoda BIRDS CHIRP AND MIGRATE. Rivers flow. People die. Snow falls. Many people know about the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. None of these singular thi…
There’s never enough space to cover them all, but in an effort to account for as many titles as possible, here are thirteen 2021 translations for your reading list, including novels, nonfiction, p…
Photo by Trevor Vannoy on Unsplash THE CITY—rainy, with moody skies and smoke rising from the rooftops—gazes at the yawning lake that protects her, as if searching for someth…
BOOKSTORES ARE OFTEN pegged as refuges, sanctuaries, havens, and the like, but they behave more accurately like consulates. With their filing systems, scuttling attendants, and all…
Photo by Natalya Y. on Unsplash A Bosnian Swedish writer considers how extreme nuances and barely perceptible differences, which signify no change in the core meaning of a word, still evo…
Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash ANDREA TOMPA’S WORK, as a theater critic and public intellectual, has been an inspiration for me for years, and I am delighted to bring her m…
IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I ha…
SINCE THE MILLENNIUM, the availability of English translations of Icelandic literature has grown exponentially. It is impossible to dismiss the effect of Nordic Noir in this developme…
Photo by Victor Malyushev on Unsplash AFTER A HIATUS since my student days in the early 1970s, I’ve been living in Vienna again since 2006. That year I became immersed in a V…