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In her new essay collection, These Particular Women (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023), Kat Meads writes about famous twentieth-century women, mostly authors. In th…
Essay
June 21, 2023
June 8, 2023Photo by Bekky Bekks / Unsplash Hoping to see more peace and empathy in the world, a high school teacher in San Francisco creates a Peace Club where, in yielding control of an event to a sixte…
March 8, 2023Scene from Performance Survivor’s Syndrome, based on a work by Andriy Bondarenko, Harmyder Theater (Lutsk, Ukraine), directed by Ruslana Porytska (@ruslana.porytska), starring Vadym Khainskyi (@v…
March 1, 2023Photo by NASA / Unsplash “All our AI Frankenstein stories,” the author writes, “warn us that AI will destroy us, but far louder than that, they promise that the future is going to be mind-blo…
January 4, 2023Kishore giving his acceptance speech for the Cesare De Michelis Prize in Venice, May 25, 2022 / Photo copyright © by Stefano Marchiante Naveen Kishore, publisher of Seagull Books, became…
December 16, 2022Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language and culture have been repressed and russified for over two centuries by both tsarist Russia and the USSR. Michael M. Naydan looks at the evidence for Russia…
October 17, 2022Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop ent…
August 16, 2022Reflecting on the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, Andrew Martino asks, “What does the attack on Rushdie tell us about ourselves, about our relationship to literature and writers?” Like mo…
August 15, 2022A writer uses a step-by-step guide as a mode of recounting her past pains as an American Orthodox priest’s wife, then comes full circle to the present as she grapples with her powerlessness…
June 2, 2022Photo by Alfons Morales / Unsplash In the following tribute, the author offers a reading of Pitol’s masterwork, El arte de la fuga. “Escape—flight—fugue,” he writes; “the polypho…
May 10, 2022A Ukrainian American scholar in Philadelphia contemplates Americans’ waning interest in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukrainian, her first language, “diasporic words, words that resonate with…
May 5, 2022Three cards from Courtney Alexander’s tarot deck, the Three of Blades, Young Coin (the collage includes the eyes of Misty Copeland), and the Ace of Staffs. How do images shape us cultural…
March 8, 2022Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay. Born in 1956…
March 8, 2022Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr Berlin poet, essayist, and playwright Esther Dischereit responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the shelling near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi Germ…
February 28, 2022“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies,” Roberto Bolaño, who enjoyed accruing enemies in the pantheon of Latin American letters, writes in the short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (…
February 24, 2022Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today. In Pavl…
February 2, 2022Photo by Miko Guziuk / Unsplash In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan…
January 3, 2022Photo by simpleinsomnia / Flickr If men and women reappraise the stories of masculinity they’ve received in texts by male authors, we all might better understand the stories we have.…
December 8, 2021Gurnah received the Nobel Prize medal and diploma from the Swedish ambassador on December 6 © Nobel Prize Outreach / Photo by Hugh Fox Earlier this week, Abdulrazak Gurnah received t…
October 20, 2021Photo by Eileen Pan / Unsplash “Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an…
August 17, 2021Postcard for One City One Book Hong Kong 2020, which featured Xi Xi’s My City The Shanghai-born Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (b. 1937) was the 2019 winner of the Newman Prize…
July 29, 2021Photo by Jason Kocheran / Unsplash A left-behind daughter of the Philippines reflects on her mother’s honorable sacrifice: leaving her family behind to support them while working abroad.…
July 14, 2021Photo by Rodion Kutsaev / Unsplash When I met Emmanuel Carrère in 2014, I had one question for him. I was sent by the magazine I worked for at the time to interview him at a literary festival…
July 13, 2021Sylvia Petter recalls Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker, who passed away June 4, not long after the book-themed TV series ÜBER featured her in its first episode. Friederike May…
July 7, 2021Photos by Mai Al-Nakib / Courtesy of the author Civilizations, empires, dynasties, and monarchies end, leaving behind ruins of their fabled splendor. Traces of achievements become more or les…
Recent Posts
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In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable…
Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) transcended cultural boundaries to become a global environmental parable. This essay explores the…
Photo by Heiko / Stock.adobe.com
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it…
The year 2025 has been a remarkable one for French writer Marc Alyn (b. 1937). First, La Rumeur libre published his three-volume collected works…
Not nearly enough writers are translators, but all translators are writers. (And novelists and poets and essayists and playwrights and memoirists.)…
