Puterbaugh Essay Series

September 2018

In the Den of the Voice

By Philip Metres

An overgrown yard at a factory where statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders used to be made. Photo: Philip Metres In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland,...
March 2018

The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003

By Sadek R. Mohammed

Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif...
January 2018

Border Ghosts

By Kapka Kassabova

Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur...
November 2017

Selective Empathy: Stories and the Power of Narrative

By Aminatta Forna

Photo: Daniel Tellman / Flickr Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change t...
September 2017

Verse Africa: The Malleable Poetics of Some Contemporary African Poets

By Matthew Shenoda

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...
May 2017

Streaming

By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed moment....
March 2017

When Bodies Speak

By Githa Hariharan

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...
January 2017

Strangers in the Country of the Poet

By Julia Fiedorczuk

“One Foot Wrong” by Parée Erica. Parée Erica/Flickr Against the background of the Polish parliament’s consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests,...
November 2016

Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories: The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard

By Alison Anderson

Photo: Flickr.com/people/nex230 Do we need a special issue devoted solely to women writers? Indeed we do. Author and translator Alison Anderson explains why. Do we still need magazi...
September 2016

The Scold’s Bridle

By Dubravka Ugrešić

Made of iron, this scold’s bridle from Belgium dates from the 16th or 17th century. The strut of metal that went into the wearer’s mouth to hold down her tongue has broken off. If there’...
May 2016

Writing a Life Back into the World

By Bernice Chauly

The author’s father, Surinder Singh, onboardThe Southampton bound for England, 1958 In the wake of her father’s death, a Malaysian author discovers the writer within and ends up writing...
March 2016

We Were Born in the Houses of Storytellers

By Ghassan Zaqtan

Ghassan Zaqtan (left) and Mahmoud Darwish in a 2007 photo taken by Palestinian poet Bashir Shalash. After presenting a sweeping landscape of Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic days...
January 2016

Fiction: A Transgressive Art

By K. Anis Ahmed

A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgres...