Anthologist-activist Rocío Durán-Barba on his two Resistir anthologies and four poets and poems from those books.
“Native American authors created a new world of books, the crucial books of presence, resistance, survivance, and liberty,” from “Presence in the Book,” by Gerald Vizenor
The sculptures of Italian artist Italo Lanfredini—harmoniously integrated into the “aura” or “spirit” of their site—are conceptualized as giant books that can be “read” by the viewer, ultimately turning into “song, enchantment, beauty, and prayer.” The artist claims that he “does not claim to have the truth and above all has no answers, only questions.”
“And yet they still read / real books / turning page after page,” from “Real Books,” by Anna Frajlich (trans. by Piotr Florczyk)
“How to raise an offspring who curses a place that / she has never visited, / who dreams in a language she doesn’t know, / who lives in another one which will always be foreign to her?,” from “Obscenity,” by Paloma Chen (trans. by Lawrence Schimel)
“mama says: you should know your own language / papa says: you’ve gone completely Russian / if I hadn’t come to this country, / my kids would be normal / my kids would have grown up normal,” from “‘mama is laughing haha . . .’,” by Egana Dzhabbarova
Abidjan ’99: A Journey through Disbelief
Looking for relief and new possibilities, a lecturer at the University of Ibadan travels to Cape Town, but the route is anything but direct.
Where have books been? Where are they going? In this tour d’horizon, Alice-Catherine Carls finds common goals among keepers of books even as the many forms of the book expand.
With the introduction of new platforms for reading and engaging with the printed word in recent decades, book lovers might be forced to wonder: Is this a book? The authors mull the protean transformations of books and the ongoing evolution of print culture.
Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet’s mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims.
A Republic of the Imagination: In Conversation with Azar Nafisi
Editor-in-Chief Daniel Simon interviews Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi.
Clara Luper, Freedom’s Classroom, and the Civil Rights Movement: A Conversation with Marilyn Luper Hildreth
In his ongoing column, which appears in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. Hill interviews Marilyn Luper Hildreth, the daughter of civil rights activist Clara Luper.