Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash
In the summer of 2020, a man who has lost much dreads reopening, when everyone will be with everyone again, but he will be alone.
The sign on the window read…
Pandemic Dispatches
August 30, 2022
September 27, 2021Photo by Burgess Milner / Unsplash Winnowing down to essentials during a pandemic, a writer with too much time to think cleans out her closet and immediately regrets letting go of a sweater. We’v…
July 7, 2021Photo by Chris Knight / Unsplash Despite political differences, a client finds common ground with his barber in 1990s NBA players and teams. Trimming my bangs, my barber starts up. “Jordan’s…
June 18, 2021Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas MukherjeeIn honor of Father’s Day, writer Dipika Mukherjee remembers her father, Kalidas Mukherjee, who passed away in New Delhi on May 8, 2021. This…
June 16, 2021Photo by Daniel Tafjord / Unsplash Unrequited love I download a book. One of those books—for women. Certainly not porn, but you know. Never mind the shirtl…
May 6, 2021Lupines / Photo by Robert Bradbury A writer in Newfoundland gets away—relocating for three weeks to Pinchgut Lake, only fifteen minutes from her home. Treating the change as “every bit as importa…
March 17, 2021Images courtesy of Italo Lanfredini / italolanfredini.it Invitations The outside brick wall of La Silenziosa, Italo Lanfredini’s house-studio-open-air-museum near Commessaggio, Italy,…
February 24, 2021Photo by Oscar Sutton / Unsplash During quarantine, a poet, essayist, and aphorist returns to the aphorism, the “sushi of literature.” If life has placed you on probation, best to proceed wi…
January 19, 2021Photo courtesy of the author Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spending time in her backyard—a “precious contained universe, teeming with life”—a writer ponders whether we’ll emerge…
January 14, 2021Photo credit: Elsa Noblet / Unsplash After 140 days at home, one person wants more space; the other, more plants. I wanted a room of my own, so I talked my husband into moving into a larger…
August 18, 2020A seller of lepyoshka in Kiev Street, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan / Photo by Irene Strong / Unsplash In And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, forthcoming on August 25, dozens of esteemed…
July 6, 2020Photo by Alex Pasarelu / Unsplash A new mother in Mexico contemplates the future—for her daughter, for all of us. On February 1, 2020, as I was giving birth in Mexico City, fifty-four people…
June 24, 2020Corona Avenue, Queens / Photos by David Rohlfing (1) On the longest day of the longest year, I did not sleep. I stood as witness with the maximum tilt of the Arctic Circle toward the sun. (2) I live…
June 15, 2020In this letter to a friend, a health-care worker, Mahtem Shiferraw traces the devastating effects of war and how, with Covid-19—this war “that bloomed itself out of nothing, that continued to sha…
June 10, 2020Historical markers for Ismail Yassine. They are both off of 26th of July Street. Photo courtesy of the author Suffering news fatigue, a writer-translator walks Cairo’s streets searching for the h…
June 3, 2020In this column that originally appeared in La Jornada, Elena Poniatowska considers the role of editors and talks with Diego Rabasa, founder of publisher Sexto Piso. Already precarious, t…
May 7, 2020View inland from the top of Zennor Hill / Courtesy of the author Walking his dogs through the Zennor moors, a writer in Cornwall contemplates the area’s literary history and discovers the ever-gr…
April 30, 2020Gulf Road and the Kuwait City skyline / Photo courtesy of the author Reflecting on the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the current pandemic, the author writes about wanting “to grab the future wit…
April 20, 2020Writer Ethel Rohan documents the little victories that stand in place of the life events that should be happening out there as she and her family shelter in place in San Francisco. M…
April 7, 2020“By the smallest of one’s actions, one can restore some sense of order to the world.”—Amor Towles Under lockdown with her four roommates in Cape Town, South Africa, SarahBelle Selig recalls all t…
April 3, 2020Photo by Stephane P / Flickr A Bolivian writer living in the United States paints a complete picture of his days in quarantine in New York, the most difficult in the city since the attack on the…
March 23, 2020Photos by Pierpaolo Florio A novelist living in quarantine in Florence looks back at Italy’s cultural history and then forward, considering whether something positive might rise from the ruins th…
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