Essays
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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,... -
Photo: A still from “This is America” by Childish Gambino Poet Ladan Osman considers how Childish Gambino obliterates rooted acts of black optimism and expression, leading us to underst... -
A monument to Don Quixote in Tandil, Argentina. Photo: Carlos Barengo/Pixabay China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their inn... -
Still from Still Tomorrow (2016), dir. Jian Fan, produced by Youku Tudou, Inc. She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speec... -
left Claribel Alegría, 1953. right Flakoll-Alegría family, 1959. Left to right: Patricia, Erik, Claribel, Karen, Maya, Bud. Photos used by permission of Er... -
photo: three-shots/pixabay As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to... -
Editorial note: This sidebar appears with Erik Gleibermann’s essay “Inside the Bilingual Writer” in the same issue M arlon James’s use of Jamaican Patois in his 2015 Booker Prize–winning nove... -
Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Shteyngart. Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair Through a series of interviews, E... -
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... -
illustration: jen rickard blair On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps ev... -
Offering tea in the Qadia/Rwanga IDP (internally displaced persons) camp, in the western Dohuk governorate of northern Iraq. As of February 2017, the population of the camp was 14,762 (including some... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
Each year, writers and musicians from across the globe converge in Kosovo for the three-day Festival of Literature in Orllan, a vibrant celebration of local and international literature. Here, poe... -
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... -
Remnants of an oil spill in the Niger Delta. Photo: Michael Uwemedimo / cmapping.net Niger Delta poet Ebi Yeibo’s verse lyrically engages the Nigerian nation on looming postindependence issues wh... -
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... -
www.flickr.com/people/limone51 After you died, I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted awa... -
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... -
“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,... -
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... -
Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir, Snow Symbol I, 2015, 100 x 100 cm, oil on linen. Photo by Pétur Thomsen. In these philosophical meditations for a Reykjavík art exhibit, Icelandic author Oddný Eir looks i... -
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’... -
Photo by Kevin Lau The following essay argues for the importance of shifting world literature courses away from “survey” and toward the interrogation of categories of knowledge that typi...
