Essays
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London is peppered with the grotesque. Is this a revival of a Dickensian past, Johnny Depp style, or are we creating a new carnivalesque? From pickled sharks to supermodel yoga, how close must you... -
A map showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946-2010. http://www.jvpchicago.org/resources/brief-history Like all Palestinians who have lived in historic Palestine since its fragmentation in 194...
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For more, see the gallery of Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadsides. In March 2007 a car-bomb suicide attack destroyed the entire perimeter of Al-Mutanabbi Street, the heart and soul of Baghdad...
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Sept. 2009 WLT Many of Laila Lalami’s childhood memories while growing up in Morocco feature books written in French. This early exposure led her to write in F...
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May 2007 WLT Don’t think I believe the people erected this statue to mebecause I know better than you that I commissioned it myself.Nor do I pretend to pass into posterity with itbe...
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Sept. 2007 WLT My friend, the late Vine Deloria Jr., once chided me for remarking too often a time when dogs could talk. I had to admit that he was probably right. I had discovered...
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March 2009 WLT The moment we open a book and yield to the adventurous challenge, we assert that our place of residence is in the Republic of Letters. It cannot...
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July 2009 WLT When I Google my name online and click on result seventy-two, say—way down past the sites featuring remaindered copies of my books for as little as one penny plus shipping and...
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The first time I spoke with Anthony Shadid was over the phone in September of last year, while driving north on Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Stillwater. I can't recall where in the world of...
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Tezuka Osamu spent the first two decades of his career entertaining Japanese children with his manga like Tetsuwan Atomu, but the rigors of being Japan's most visible creative public icon...
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LEFT: Femi Osofisan (Okinba Launko), a Nigerian playwright, poet, translator, critic, and theorist of literature, is also a regular columnist in Nigeria's leading newspapers. http:/...
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In Argentinian literature of the 1920s and 1930s, Jorge Luis Borges’s imagined topography of Buenos Aires was key to positioning Argentine culture at the same level as European and American cultur...
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Left: Rosa Motero, photo by Violeta Lama. Right: Empar Moline, photo by Jordi Play. Of the many trends in literary journalism today, the use of humor to convey sociocultural critiques continues...
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In a ceremony on February 27, 2010, presided over by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the Coordinator of the Council On Communication and Citizenshi...
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Are science and poetry inherently at odds with one another? Poet and cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam explores the nature of interactions between these two disciplines....
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The meeting ground between science and literature has never been so busy. Not only have the last few years seen a proliferation of anthologies such as Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired...
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The landscape of southern AlbaniaPhoto (c) 2006 by John K. Cox Since the end of communism and the revival of old customs and compulsions, ten thousand people have died from blood f...
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An interloper in a male world, Yrsa Roca Fannberg in her Barcelona FC watercolors paints the "ordinary gestures" that the experts often ignore. Female Control by Yrsa Roca Fannbe...
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The waves of mass killing that swept across the old Mitteleuropa during the 1930s and ’40s are neither forgotten nor ignored by twenty-first-century writers. Four recent novels illustrate this con...
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Listening suggestion: While reading Camp's essay, listen to Louis Armstrong’s version of the Fats Waller song “Black and Blue," available for streaming on YouTube. Can a writer ever hope to success...
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For three days in November 2011, fifteen women writers gathered in Oaxaca City, Mexico, filling a colonial apartment next door to a church dedicated to the Virgin of Solitude. These woman are all—by...
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¡Ay! diidxazá, diidxazá diidxa'rusibani naa, naa nanna zanítilu dxi guiniti gubidxa cá. Oh, Zapotec, dear Zapotec language that gives me life, I know you will not dieuntil the sun's demise.– Gabriel L...
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The following essay is adapted from a talk given at the symposium honoring Han Shaogong, winner of the 2011 Newman Prize for Children’s Literature, at the University of Oklahoma in February 2011....
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Photo by Ed Swinden Cream torpedoes? The reference is to a Tweet I spotted recently: "A cream torpedo from the Hataitai Bakery! I feel like I am in a poem by Jenny Bornholdt." The Tweeter? Cheryl Bern...
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In the Ukrainian literary tradition there have been scores of women poets, several of them reaching extraordinarily prominent status. The most renowned of them include the legendary seventeenth-centur...
