Last year, thousands of Tibetan students took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s decision to conduct all elementary and high school education in the official Chinese language, Mandarin...
The essence of photography is writing with light. It is the visual language that we use daily and increasingly communicate with. Millions of photographs appear everyday in newspapers, magazines, books...
It’s not only individual lives that Mistry paints with such meticulousness; it’s how he stretches his canvas to embrace the wider world that makes his work comparable to the contemporary giants of...
Having just spent a year in Berlin, novelist Claire Messud reports on her observations in and around the city. “In Berlin,” she writes, “a sense of becoming trumps a sense of bel...
“If the law permeates our lives before we are born, reaching even into the womb, so too do stories, guaranteeing that law and literature will remain intimate bedfellows in the years to come.” Deji...
The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and...
Sudden, Flash, Nano, Short-Short, Micro, Minificción . . .
"I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish;...
Photo by Pesis/FLIKR
Under the sign of the bicycle, writers and riders share a special affinity. Alon Raab offers a global literary tour.Bicycles: because lo...
"Science fiction works differentially from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. . . . It has its own particular ways of making sense out of langua...
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...
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...
Sept. 2009 WLTMany 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...
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...
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...
March 2009 WLTThe 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...
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...
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...
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...
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:/...
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...
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...
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...
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....