Essays
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Left to right: Ayobami Adebayo, Chigozie Obioma, and Romeo Oriogun Three millennial writers probe inner male conflict while the patriarch Achebe looks on. A man lays his head on hi... -
Relief at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Photo: Clare_and_ben / flickr Standing before a museum exhibit of a mummified five-year-old “Purchased in Egypt in 1895,” a father... -
A monument to poet Adam Mickiewicz. Photo: Jutta M. Jenning / Flickr A couple finds their hired tour guide more sage for hire—like Socrates, an ambulatory pedagogue. I saw him first from th... -
A woman runs with a purple smoke bomb during a protest against sexual abuse of women on August 16, 2019, in Mexico City. Photo: Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images Though the feminist respons... -
ARShAT performing a Transforma. Photo: Ruslan Yakupov Traveling across central Asia, Nicholas Pritchard discovers musical acts of dissent in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Our problems have now risen... -
Basque poet and bertsolari winner Maialen Lujanbio during the 2017 Bertsolari Grand Championship. Photo: Dani Blanco / Wikimedia In Basque and other minority-language traditions in Euro... -
Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest, Hungary. Photo: Daniel Olah / Unsplash Sometime in the mid-1980s, at the first conference of the European Association of American Studies held behind the Iron Curta... -
Pink Montanelli derivative work by Jen Rickard Blair. Original Photo: Jean-Marc Linder / Flickr An Italian-born Somali writer confronts Italy’s colonial past, beginning with an Italian... -
Photo: Azteca Stadium during 1986 World Cup in Mexico/ wikimedia In 1980s Mexico, boys clash off-field during the 1986 FIFA World Cup. Back then, my father worked installing aluminum parts... -
Left: Patricia Jacas as Alisa. Photo © Jose Luis Laborda. Middle: Jorge Ferrer with Svetlana Alexievich. Right: Lizard photo by Thomas Helbig/Flickr A Cuban writer, having lived in Soviet-era Mo... -
Photo: Viktor Dobai / Flickr In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, the author’s current book-length project (in progress), Edward Hirsch offers short essays on poems he finds especially hea... -
A photography installation from Dinh Q. Lê’s exhibit True Journey Is Return at the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Sharon Mollerus Not far from where I live now, a kilometer or so, there’s t... -
Isla (la otra orilla), 2013, by Cuban artist Yoan Capote. Oil, fish-hooks, and nails on panel of canvas and plywood, 104 x 154 x 8 cm Through conversations with several translators, V... -
PHOTO: Andrea Moroni, Patmos / Flickr Only travel can teach us anything. Only travel can move us out of our staid lives into a fresh perspective, to see before us what has not been before us. It is... -
PHOTO: Jen Rickard Blair After translating more than two hundred titles into Spanish and Catalan, Carles Andreu focuses on his translations of Jennifer Egan’s work to consider the role of intuit... -
Spiegel by Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom. PHOTO: puffin11k/Flickr Can contemporary reading methods catch up with the proliferation of and innovation in mul... -
PHOTO: Alexandru Acea/Unsplash Reviewing Ma Jian’s three-decades-long career, Elizabeth Fifer traces the banned and exiled Chinese writer’s deepening critique. A newly translated work of fi... -
Camp de la Transportation in French Guiana. Photo: Rodolphe Hammadi In this excerpt from French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony, Chamoiseau explores the possibilities of rewriti... -
Photo: Maged/Flickr Throughout its 2,500-year history, irrespective of whether it was a Carthaginian colony, a Roman provincial capital, a Portuguese colony, an English naval outpost, or a Morocca... -
Releasing the Truth, mixed media on canvas by Florine Démosthène. Courtesy of the artist. What is this sense of dislocation? Do others have it? A wandering writer explores displacement o... -
A scene from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Satyagraha. Photo: Ken Howard/Courtesy of LA Opera During a 1969 trip to India, composer Philip Glass was compelled to learn... -
The O-Töne literary festival brings hundreds of people to the central square of MuseumsQuartier. Photo courtesy of O-Töne. At the new Literaturmuseum, nestled in a historic building on Johannesgasse... -
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...
