William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: 2. The Tête à Tête (1743)After a decade of talking to strangers while traveling, J. R. Patterson explores why strangers make some of the best conversation…
Essays
For the past few years I’ve been living in Lahore. Like they have for many, the brave women-led Iranian protests have made me reflect on the rights of women and the price we pay for freedom and justic…
When Irina Flige visited the University of Oklahoma to receive the 2022 Clyde Snow Social Justice Award earlier this year, she delivered the following public lecture, based on her work with the Russia…
In the mid-1960s Lam’s mother ran an orphanage in Sadec in the Mekong Delta, when his father was stationed there.Remembering his mother, who loved and protected without wavering, writer Andrew Lam als…
Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefiniti…
Bridget Pitt, author of the novel Eye Brother Horn, reflects on how South Africa’s colonial history, and the entanglement of nature conservation with social inequality and violence, mean…
The Democracy Monument in Bangkok / Wikipedia Chiranan Pitpreecha’s poetry gave voice to Thailand’s mass pro-democracy movement of the early 1970s. After a violent government crackdown in 1976, s…
Photo: Jorge Prior Mexican writer Mónica Lavín recalls the tastes and places of her Mexico City neighborhood, tracing its changes through its food. When we moved to the house on Presidente…
One of the most influential schools of twentieth-century art and design was known as The Bauhaus. Operating in Germany between 1919 and 1933 and bustling with experimentation in areas linking fine art…
Holmsland Klit on the west coast of Jutland, by Hvide Sande, Denmark When a landscape is in motion, people and buildings are compelled to follow. This is a basic rule when living with the North S…
Illustration by Inga-Wiktoria Påve / Courtesy of White Pine Press Niillas Holmberg’s collection Juolgevuođđu, co-translated by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Johanna Domokos and forthcoming in…
Photo by SarahBelle Selig A frequent traveler currently winding her way through Central America celebrates the free book swaps along the way, and all the hope and longing nestled amongst their sh…
Named after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood—Nigeria’s motion-picture industry—began on VHS tapes, literally gained altitude as in-flight offerings in the 1990s, and now has films streaming on…
In the following essay, the author explores the apathy she finds even within herself in the face of a gradually expanding drought in Chile, the country most affected by the water crisis in Latin…
Shipping containers seen over a rainwater pond and beyond the fence that surrounds Shoreham Yards / Photo by Magali Pijpers Can healthy fruits and vegetables grow on polluted soil? “The Long Nigh…
The following essay is a memorial tribute to Olga Krause’s friend and fellow LGBT leader Sergey Shcherbakov, who died under suspicious circumstances in 1999. The text situates their friendship wi…
Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash ●1. I love that ellipses begin with an ancient Greek word meaning “to leave out.” I admire this wistful, self-quieting punctuation mark composed of three dots, sepa…
“Doctor and the Doll” by PMillera4 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Patient Message for Dr. Epstein: After an hour of pushing buttons and cursing at my keyboard, I figured out how to set up your pat…
The zhetygen is a stringed instrument of the peopoles of Central Asia and Kazakhstan Young Kazakh musicians are diversifying Kazakh music and putting an end to the previous generation’s…
Painting was called “silent poetry.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Eager to emerge from isolation and encounter art and (safely) others, a writer in Florida takes in Van Gogh Alive at th…
China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves…
Photo by Fowzia Karimi An Afghan American writer recalls her own departure from Afghanistan in 1980 and the weariness she observed on a 2015 visit back to Kabul. Now, having watched events unfold…
Poet Kali Regenvanu at the market in Port Vila Vanuatu’s fortieth independence anniversary in 2020 sparked an unprecedented literary wave of new writing. Harnessing the colonizers’ languages, as…
Life and politics are the same on an empty plate, in a body plagued by a pandemic. But in Cuba, people are rising up and challenging the regime. Here, Cuban American poet Carlos Pintado traces th…
Photo by Se Osomajtli Tsawi For Indigenous writers like Zoque poet and activist Mikeas Sánchez, language serves as a unifying element in the struggle to defend lands and life. This essay’s title…