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Essays

Autumn 2019

Say “Thank You”

By Emiliano Monge

Photo: Azteca Stadium during 1986 World Cup in Mexico/ wikimedia In 1980s Mexico, boys clash off-field during the 1986 FIFA World Cup. Back then, my father worked installing aluminum...
Autumn 2019

A Date with Svetlana Alexievich in Berlin: or, Smuggling Bugs into Soviet Moscow

By Jorge Ferrer

Left: Patricia Jacas as Alisa. Photo © Jose Luis Laborda. Middle: Jorge Ferrer with Svetlana Alexievich. Right: Lizard photo by Thomas Helbig/Flickr A Cuban writer, having lived in Soviet-...
Autumn 2019

The Poetry of Heartbreak: Miklós Radnóti’s “The Fifth Eclogue”

By Edward Hirsch

Photo: Viktor Dobai / Flickr 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 especial...
Summer 2019

Bearing Witness to Climate Change: 9 Artists Making an Impact

By Jen Rickard Blair

One of my favorite recent maxims about becoming better stewards of the earth is this one from waste-minimizing chef Anne-Marie Bonneau: “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. W...
Summer 2019

Escaping Indoors

By Chris Arthur

Photo: Stuart Lime Digital In a series of vignettes, essayist Chris Arthur considers why “respecting what gives life is not a lesson to be learned indoors.” In E. M. Forster’s A R...
Summer 2019

Living in the Tenses in Saigon

By Andrew Lam

A photography installation from Dinh Q. Lê’s exhibit True Journey Is Return at the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Sharon Mollerus Not far from where I live now, a kilometer or so, the...
Summer 2019

Carrying a People Across a Watery Divide: Translating Cuba in the Twenty-First Century

By Vanessa Garcia

Isla (la otra orilla), 2013, by Cuban artist Yoan Capote. Oil, fish-hooks, and nails on panel of canvas and plywood, 104 x 154 x 8 cm Through conversations with several translat...
Spring 2019

Hong Kong’s Table Talks

By Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Illustration by Yang (see footnote) AS THE YEARS GO BY and I get more advanced in age, I find I have become increasingly self-aware. It’s hardly an astonishing revelation, of...
Spring 2019

To Write from a Place of Permanent Exile

By Nicholas Samaras

PHOTO: Andrea Moroni, Patmos / Flickr Only travel can teach us anything. Only travel can move us out of our staid lives into a fresh perspective, to see before us what has not been before us....
Spring 2019

Hong Kong Food Runes

By Lian-Hee Wee

PHOTO: WakingPhotoLife/Flickr Infiltrating Hong Kong’s noodle stalls, Lian-Hee Wee investigates the quick, mysterious writing used by waiters on order slips. Nobody knows I’m a fraud...
Spring 2019

Dwelling Poetically in Hong Kong

By Bei Dao

PHOTO: Rikki Chan/Unsplash Now settled in Hong Kong, one of China’s most influential contemporary writers considers the city’s cultural positioning and how to improve its cultural ecology....
Spring 2019

Alien Citizen Field Notes: An Introduction

By Ladan Osman

Light-damaged photograph of a man sifting through salt at the mines in Bilma, Niger. PHOTO: Ladan Osman In this lyrical introduction to her Alien Citizen Field Notes project, Ladan Osman c...
Spring 2019

“And Leaving from the Crowded City”

By Ladan Osman

LEFT The abandoned frame of a sedan. Car frames offer shade and serve as markers of graves as well as failed journeys. RIGHT Vehicles pause during the hottest hours to avoid stressing t...
Spring 2019

Landscape Vertigo

By Ladan Osman

A former driver of migrants holds a peacock feather during his interview in Dirkou. PHOTO: Ladan Osman Traveling on to Dirkou, long a respite town on the desert road to and from Libya, an...
Spring 2019

The Role of Intuition in Translation

By Carles Andreu

PHOTO: Jen Rickard Blair After translating more than two hundred titles into Spanish and Catalan, Carles Andreu focuses on his translations of Jennifer Egan’s work to consider the role of...
Spring 2019

Reading Multilingual Arab Literatures Globally in the Twenty-First Century

By Syrine Hout

Spiegel by Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom. PHOTO: puffin11k/Flickr Can contemporary reading methods catch up with the proliferation of and innovation...
Spring 2019

Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian

By Elizabeth Fifer

PHOTO: Alexandru Acea/Unsplash Reviewing Ma Jian’s three-decades-long career, Elizabeth Fifer traces the banned and exiled Chinese writer’s deepening critique. A newly translated work...
Winter 2019

“All Geography Is Within Me”: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt

By Edwidge Danticat

Following the performances of two Haitian-inspired dances at the 2018 festival, Danticat delivered the following keynote to the audience of several hundred in attendance. 1 This past June I w...
Winter 2019

“Stretching the Limits of Silence”: Witness and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Nonfiction

By Renee H. Shea

Photo: Parth Upadhyay/Unsplash Reflecting back over Edwidge Danticat’s nonfiction, Renee H. Shea finds much to be grateful for in Danticat’s extension of her personal stories into political and...
Winter 2019

Met Fanm Sou Ou

By Marie Casimir

OU School of Dance students performing Women Like Us at the 2018 Neustadt Lit Fest / Photo by Nancy Barcelo In her latest collection of essays, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Stor...
Winter 2019

Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat

By Achy Obejas

Photo: Shevaun Williams Thank you to the Neustadt Prize committee, Neustadt sisters and family, the University of Oklahoma, the incredible writers who served with me on the jury last year. It is my...
Winter 2019

Weaving a Creole Patrimony

By Patrick Chamoiseau

Camp de la Transportation in French Guiana. Photo: Rodolphe Hammadi In this excerpt from French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony, Chamoiseau explores the possibilities of rewr...
Winter 2019

You’ll Never Leave: Seeking Salvation on the Shores of Morocco

By André Naffis-Sahely

Photo: Maged/Flickr Throughout its 2,500-year history, irrespective of whether it was a Carthaginian colony, a Roman provincial capital, a Portuguese colony, an English naval outpost, or a Moro...
November 2018

An Anatomy of Lostness

By Anna Badkhen

Releasing the Truth, mixed media on canvas by Florine Démosthène. Courtesy of the artist. What is this sense of dislocation? Do others have it? A wandering writer explores displacement o...
November 2018

On Fire: Five Meditations on Opera

By Kevin Simmonds

A scene from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Satyagraha. Photo: Ken Howard/Courtesy of LA Opera During a 1969 trip to India, composer Philip Glass was compelled to learn...

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