“The stark choice between freedom and autocracy laid bare by Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the example of Ukraine’s dogged fight for freedom and democracy may have unblocked the EU’s own internal struggle to protect democracy within its ranks.”
“The middle of the day conveys the / age of the girls / certain / they have succeeded in quietly shattering / a chapter of their lives,” from “The Age of the Girls,” by João Luís Barreto Guimarães (trans. from Portuguese by Calvin Olsen
“Writing is erased / With one strike / delete / I used to think I could keep it close / That it was a strange beauty / Its truth forever uncomfortable / But that’s not the case / It soon fades,” from “Anna,” by Victoria Guerrero Peirano (trans. from Spanish by Anna Rosenwong & María José Giménez)
“We read your family history on lamp-posts: // your escape from Liantang, your ancestral home, / settling for Pink Shek in Kowloon. // You hailed Wen Tianxiang and Sun Yat-sen, / charged the Queen for usurping your land,” from “King of Kowloon,” by Jennifer Wong.
In Colombian writer Octavio Escobar Giraldo’s first publication in English, it isn’t only the parishioner saying her Hail Marys.
A woman gives birth in a room where all the windows are covered with pages of a book to be burned. The woman inside, the women outside: all wait for the author.
A countryside flâneuse in search of her deceased grandfather contemplates anchoring, wandering, and the small marks we leave on the world.
Named after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood—Nigeria’s motion-picture industry—began on VHS tapes, literally gained altitude as in-flight offerings in the 1990s, and now has films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Nigerian poet and lawyer Tade Ipadeola traces this rise of the industry, along with its rising scrutiny.
“It’s hard to believe that just an hour’s car ride away they’re already threatening to ration water. The worst drought in decades, they say, every year,” from “Like Creeping Lava,” an essay by Catalina Infante Beovic
Can healthy fruits and vegetables grow on polluted soil? “The Long Night,” from Kathryn Savage’s forthcoming Groundglass: An Essay, confronts the transgressions of US Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people.
Anderson Tepper interviews Nigerian writer Ben Okri, author of Astonishing the Gods and Every Leaf a Hallelujah. They speak about invisibility, consciousness, and the lifesaving powers of literature.
Writer and translator Ena Selimović interviews Croatian writer Maša Kolanović about her illustrated novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie).
Jennifer Wong is a poet, critic, and translator based in the UK. Here she discusses her poetry, her wide-ranging interest in the visual arts and aesthetics, her understanding of the agency of art, and the notion of ekphrasis, now used to refer to literary descriptions of visual artworks.
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