IT'S A RUNNING JOKE that Nagoya is the most boring city in Japan, and at first glance it seems like there’s some truth to it. It’s not the flashy Tokyo, the bustling merchant cit…
Varia
Photos: Erin DonnellyWhile Buenos Aires is primarily known for Maradona, the tango, and some of the tastiest steak in the world, for me it will always be the city of books. The booming literary scene…
Hummingbirds Between the PagesChris ArthurOhio State University Press (2018)Chris Arthur’s most recent collection of essays, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, makes a compelling argument on beh…
Photo: Richard Burger/FlickrGiven the years of apprenticeship that most professional writers put in, it is not surprising that notable persons in sports, politics, and other fields rarely have the tim…
ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I read as a teen was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was transported into a fantastical world that could occur by simply wal…
Norwegian musicians Bernt Jansen and Nils Kvaale Rue perform bass and vocals in Jørn Lande and Trond Holter’s Dracula—Swing of Death. Photo: Boris DanielsenROCK OPERA i…
Photo: Eric Kilby/FlickrUrsula Andkjær Olsen is one of Denmark’s most important contemporary poets. A poets’ poet and a critics’ darling, she won the prestigious literary award Montanaprisen in 2013 f…
Photo: Tony WebsterOn April 21, 2016, a chain-link fence in a Minneapolis suburb became a monument. At Paisley Park in Chanhassen, purple flowers and balloons, stuffed animals, handwritten signs, and…
Photo: Alana Marie Levinson LaBrosse In the Kurdish language the word kashkul describes a Sufi’s traditional begging bowl. Over time, the term evolved to also describe a commonplace…
Illustration by Stephanie Kubo The conventional wisdom in publishing for many years has been that women read and men don’t. Market research shows that men, on the whole, read for work, concentrat…
If you’re not one of those people who has a stack of cookbooks on your nightstand already, you might not know that there’s a lot more to read in a cookbook than just the recipes. Cookbooks can be a sp…
Author Rabih Alameddine regularly shares batches of fine art on his Twitter feed. Partridges in the Snow, by Józef Marian Chełmoński, was among his recent shares.It’s no secret that Twitter i…
Photo: Google EarthThe Herring and the Saxophone (Le Hareng et le saxophone), a hybrid work by Sylvie Weil, is listed as a novel, yet just as in Tim O’Brien’s The Things…
Photo: Kirk Fisher/PixabayAmsterdam is much more than first meets the eye. From afar, Amsterdam seems to consist of only the scandalous Red Light District and the somber Anne Frank House. But up close…
photo: Tyler McElroyAbustling center of business and culture, New York City is host to one of the most vibrant literary scenes in America. Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs are often featured in…
photo: Victrola gramophone by jimmy baikovicius/flickrWhat is crime fiction about? One glib answer is the struggle between good and evil. As light is defined by darkness, there is no hero without the…
A Book Bento Box post for Hermione Hoby’s debut novel Neon in Daylight. photo: courtesy of book bento boxWhile social media gives us an unprecedented connecti…
The winter break was one of long reads: Exit West, If Beale Street Could Talk, Manhattan Beach, Little Fires Everywhere. After a busy four months of editing and…
Three brief, powerful novels in recent translation enriched my reading during the last few months. Stories of unrequited love, their protagonists suffer an unsatisfied, persistent longing for affirmat…
A house in Iceland with a turf roof. photo: jonathan andreo/unsplashWhen asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around hou…
Sligo’s River Garavogue. photo: dave gunnWhen I pulled into Sligo on the morning bus with a dog-eared copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems, I carried two wishes: first, that it wo…
photo: linda stack-nelsonI did not have an “outdoorsy” childhood. Homeschooled and incredibly bookish, I experienced trees through paper and water through ink. Because of this, I couldn’t help bu…
The Art of DeathEdwidge DanticatGraywolf Press (2017)It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about…
This postcard illustration shows the Ohio State Penitentiary before the 1930 fire that “forever tormented” Himes. I have reservations about the value of writers’ biographies in appreciating their…
Naomi Shihab NyeSitti’s SecretsSimon & Schuster Books for Young ReadersI remember coming across this beautifully written (and illustrated) children’s book when I was a hi…