An Italian-born Somali writer confronts Italy’s colonial past, beginning with an Italian journalist’s purchase and rape of a twelve-year-old girl, whom he later “gave” to “an old colonist used to having his own harem,” and extending through the Italian feminists who’ve recently become the protagonists of one of the most interesting postcolonial, transfeminist, largely urban responses to Montanelli’s legacy.
A Cuban writer, having lived in Soviet-era Moscow and East Berlin in the 1980s, reflects on real-life bugs and make-believe characters.
In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, the author’s current book-length project (in progress), Edward Hirsch offers short essays on poems he finds especially heartbreaking, including Dunya Mikhail’s “The War Works Hard,” Meena Alexander’s “Krishna, 3:29 a.m.,” Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito and the Imagination,” and Rose Ausländer’s “My Nightingale.” The following is an excerpt.
An encounter between a tonga driver and the “cruelty folks” seizes a university student’s attention on his way to class.
Zsuzsa Selyem imagines the narrative of a coyote, who was used in a performance art piece that protested the United States's treatment of indigenous peoples.
A mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court.
Always remember:
if you can write the ocean,
we will never be silenced.
From the publication of Sur le Champ (1967) to De qui n’a pas de prix (2019), Annie Le Brun’s books invite us to confront an uncompromising thought process that places at the heart of the sensible experience the relationship that each of us has with the question of disaster, without necessarily daring to admit it. This meeting in Oklahoma City centered on the theme of disaster.
Laila Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She has published four novels and received widespread critical acclaim. The Moor’s Account was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was released in March 2019.
“Neighborhoods sliced / in half. Terraces and corridors / between roofless rooms. Profiles only. / Staggered / spaces.” from “There Was No Plot,” by Coral Bracho
“Bless the ears of this land, for they hear cries of heartbreak / and shouts of celebration in this land,” from “Bless This Land,” by Joy Harjo
”Under the surgeons’ scalpel my hand is dreaming. / Stopped as an ‘unrecognized alien.’ / The lines were faded, / So was my identity.” - from “Finger in the Operating Room,” by Fatemeh Shams
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