This summer Web Editor Jen Rickard Blair is planning to read a balance of books that refuel calm and creativity as well as examine human nature and our shared hi…
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Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire.Anne CarsonFloatRandom HouseI found…
Photo: Beau RogersThe indignities and brutalities suffered by ethnic and racial groups at the hands of others are legion on the unhappiest pages of human history. Not the least of these insults is, of…
With a wealth of fiction, nonfiction, and verse stacking up in his office, Book Review Editor Rob Vollmar has narrowed his reading ambitions for the summer down to these three worthy titles.…
Rahim AlHajLetters from Iraq: Oud and String QuintetSmithsonian Folkways Iraqi-born composer Rahim AlHaj’s latest album, Letters from Iraq, is his most ambitious to date. AlHaj…
Photo: Annabelle ShemerThe creative collaboration between myself and Israeli poet Gili Haimovich began around 2009. The first poem of hers to be published in English translation was “Evolution,” with…
Photo: Bequest/PixabayBy a lake, on a train, deep in a canyon, or at home on your back porch: it’s time to catch up on the outstanding global writing publishers have been bringing out since January. H…
Stratford Theatre. Photo by Richard BainFor half the year, the hamlet of Stratford, Ontario—named after the birthplace of William Shakespeare—is much like any other small North American town. But in A…
Washington, DC, is a city that holds culture and the arts close to its heart. When the stereotypes and outside-the-beltway misconceptions about what this city is—political infighting, opportunistic st…
Kim StaffordThe Flavor of Unity: Post-Election PoemsLittle Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the gen…
Image: NEYRO2008/123rf stock photoIn his address to the International Association of Crime Writers 2013 meeting in Oxford, Christopher MacLehose commented that publishers like him are always looking f…
OYSpace DiasporaCrammed Discs This issue’s special section on climate dystopias set me wondering what kind of responses to an uncertain future dwell in the world music community. O…
Illustration: Verso BooksDespite the popular culture trope that the golden age of activism (the 1950s and ’60s) is over, despite the endless distractions offered by digital entertainment, and despite…
A still from the film Ten Years (2015).When Hong Kong was returned to communist China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” principle, no one really knew for sure what would happe…
Skeppsholmen Island in central Stockholm, home of Moderna Museet where the Stockholm Literature festival takes place. Photo: Routes North/www.routesnorth.comAs literary events go, Stockholm Literature…
Alina BronskyBaba Dunja’s Last LoveTrans. Tim MohrEuropa Editions Alina Bronsky is skillful at inventing darkly humorous protagonists, and Baba Dunja is no exception. This short novel is a surpri…
Rowan Atkinson as Maigret in the ITV feature-length adaptation of Maigret Sets a Trap.Early last year, fans of the actor Rowan Atkinson were surprised, and many astonished, by the British net…
Beats AntiqueShadowboxAntique American composer Henry Cowell traveled to a variety of countries in the 1950s on behalf of the State Department, building bridges between cultures consider…
Migrants heading north through Mexico on La Bestia (“The Beast”).Nadia Villafuerte’s collection of short stories Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston) portrays a wide variety of voices inhabit…
With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million peo…
Photos © David Joshua JenningsLiterature inhabits the antiquated, potholed avenues of New Orleans like a dense and permanent fog. Stories sweat down from the French Quarter’s trellised terraces, haunt…
Photos by Laura Hernandez.Celebrating its eleventh year, the Brooklyn Book Festival hosts writers from around the world and highlights the literary landscape in a two-day book extravaganza. The festiv…
Petina GappahRotten RowFaber & Faber2016 Petina Gappah’s new collection of stories is named after the street where the criminal courts in Harare sit: Rotten Row, where the powerful a…
This summer the British Library held another of its highly successful Bodies from the Library days celebrating the Golden Age of crime fiction. We had papers on Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and Georget…
Liu Fang (center) plays the pipa during a rehearsal with the Matangi Quartet.I have great respect for all musical traditions and have enjoyed collaborating in past decades with great mus…