Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist. Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc...

Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Taking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the f...

Photo: Jason Devaun The binaries of life bite at 3 a.m.You don’t need to fast-forward time.Envision vanishing before it happens.For those who care to...

Isolation: Companion of Conscience, by Georgitta J. Valiyamattam Iconoclast Indian novelist Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, set in the maximum city of Mumbai, is not only the...

Native Nations Rise protest. Photo by Victoria Pickering/Flickr I’m mixed but that doesn’t mean I’m mixed up—it just means my parents fell in love across a racial and cultural divide that split my bl...

Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota / German / Welsh), Self-Reflection (2011), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist (dyaniwhitehawk.com) In Spring 1992 World Literature Today...

Portrait of “the master of the ghazal” Ghalib, by Urdu Shayar. Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock Photo Poetry is of course a universal art, but is it possible for a particular poetic form to be not only u...

An aerial view of hydraulic fracturing in progress at Jonah Field in Wyoming. Photo: Bruce Gordon / Ecoflight The growth of hydraulic fracturing has inspired a subgenre of dystopian novels envisi...

A monument featuring singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky in Podgorica, Montenegro. Photo: Nico Trinkhaus Nestled between Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania, Montenegro (“black m...

A group of women stripped naked in broad daylight to protest against the brutality of the Assam Rifles army contingent (July 2004). Braiding together an epic story and India’s ongoing su...

Photo: Shevaun Williams My training as a scholar of Russian literature and culture colors my readings of Dubravka Ugrešić’s work. No matter how hard I try to stop myself from reaching for parallels i...

In 1997 I was offered a job to teach English to adults in Croatia. Of course I had been following the events that had torn Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995; and just as I was learning what I co...