Photo courtesy of the author I worked on the Broadway production of Jersey Boys for three years before I ventured up to the fly rail of the August Wilson Theater. It was pre-show and automat…

Photo by Daniel Tafjord / Unsplash Unrequited love I download a book. One of those books—for women. Certainly not porn, but you know. Never mind the shirtl…

Lupines / Photo by Robert Bradbury A writer in Newfoundland gets away—relocating for three weeks to Pinchgut Lake, only fifteen minutes from her home. Treating the change as “every bit as importa…

  Michael Berry is a professor of Asian languages and cultures and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has published extensive works on addressing the richness and div…

Photo by Oscar Sutton / Unsplash During quarantine, a poet, essayist, and aphorist returns to the aphorism, the “sushi of literature.” If life has placed you on probation, best to proceed wi…

Photo by István Biró The Tragedy of Man, by Imre Madách, premiered at the Gergely Csíky Theater of Timişoara on March 3, 2020, directed by Silviu Purcărete and adapted by András Visky. After two…

Photo by Alex Pasarelu / Unsplash A new mother in Mexico contemplates the future—for her daughter, for all of us. On February 1, 2020, as I was giving birth in Mexico City, fifty-four people…

Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers. Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressed by Inglis die-cast toolin…

Corona Avenue, Queens / Photos by David Rohlfing (1) On the longest day of the longest year, I did not sleep. I stood as witness with the maximum tilt of the Arctic Circle toward the sun. (2) I live…

In this letter to a friend, a health-care worker, Mahtem Shiferraw traces the devastating effects of war and how, with Covid-19—this war “that bloomed itself out of nothing, that continued to sha…

Historical markers for Ismail Yassine. They are both off of 26th of July Street. Photo courtesy of the author Suffering news fatigue, a writer-translator walks Cairo’s streets searching for the h…

Photo: Quentin Lagache / Unsplash In this story of lengthy quarantine due to an unnamed virus, a woman sneaks into the mountain to collect ferns—many ferns. Simultaneously evoking life under past…

In this column that originally appeared in La Jornada, Elena Poniatowska considers the role of editors and talks with Diego Rabasa, founder of publisher Sexto Piso. Already precarious, t…

Published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and awarded the 2019 American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th and21st Centuries), Stephanie Malia Hom’s Empire’s Mobius Strip: Histo…

View inland from the top of Zennor Hill / Courtesy of the author Walking his dogs through the Zennor moors, a writer in Cornwall contemplates the area’s literary history and discovers the ever-gr…

Gulf Road and the Kuwait City skyline / Photo courtesy of the author Reflecting on the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the current pandemic, the author writes about wanting “to grab the future wit…

Writer Ethel Rohan documents the little victories that stand in place of the life events that should be happening out there as she and her family shelter in place in San Francisco. M…

“By the smallest of one’s actions, one can restore some sense of order to the world.”—Amor Towles Under lockdown with her four roommates in Cape Town, South Africa, SarahBelle Selig recalls all t…

Photo by Stephane P / Flickr A Bolivian writer living in the United States paints a complete picture of his days in quarantine in New York, the most difficult in the city since the attack on the…

Photos by Pierpaolo Florio A novelist living in quarantine in Florence looks back at Italy’s cultural history and then forward, considering whether something positive might rise from the ruins th…