“Once an icon in the literary district of Cornhill, Boston, Brattle Book Shop now fits snugly near downtown, a few paces from the Common. Hidden off Tremont, and down West Street, you’ll find a fairytale courtyard with bookshelves instead of vines growing from opposing walls of this literary oasis.”
Guest editor Rea Amit shares a list of 34 books by Japanese women writers
The noticeable changes from twentieth- to twenty-first-century writers reflects the continued presence and importance of feminism internationally as Japanese women continue to move out of the spaces given to them within a male-dominated field.
“you dance / because your bellies are empty . . . / that’s how you fight loneliness & the biting economic meltdown . . . / you men with villages of wives,” from “the dance,” by Vonani Bila
This erasured handmade map was crafted through and over Samuel Penniman Bates’s chapter on the 25th United States Colored Regiment in his History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (first published in 1869).
“On the last solar term of autumn / so many good things are disappearing / The birds have printed their footsteps on the frosted tiles,” from “Frost‘s Descent,” by Ma Yongbo (trans. by Zack Rogow)
Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, few of its residents seem to know much about him. Oliver Raw investigated by visiting northern Ukraine, exploring the parallels between Conrad’s experiences of growing up under czarist oppression and Ukraine’s current struggles against a resurgent Russian imperialism.
In these chronicles of funeral workers in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, families gather in a cemetery the size of fifty soccer fields to try to achieve more or less what we’ve been trying to achieve for millennia: to dispose of our dead with sufficient care and honor as proof that their lives deserved to be lived and remembered.
An American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns.
Writing for the Children of Palestine: A Conversation with Mahmoud Shukair
An interview with Mahmoud Shukair, a literary giant in Arab and Palestinian literature, with a vast and impressive catalog of literary works spanning over eighty titles, published around the world in twelve different languages.
7 Questions for Praveen Herat
7 Questions (and 7 Answers) from In Praveen Herat, whose debut novel, Between This World and the Next (Restless Books, 2024), features a British war photographer who uncovers crime and corruption in a Cambodia beyond the rule of law.