Essays
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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... -
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...
