Essays
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Illustration: Jen Rickard Blair Scuba-diving in the Black Sea, a writer contemplates Lenin in the Crimean seabed, the watery landfall from which historical figures are never meant to rise... -
photo: Cristian / Flickr A writer traces how the murder of George Floyd is continuing to arouse people in cities everywhere, including her own mother in Martinique. Sa ki ta la r... -
An Iranian detainee hangs up her laundry on the fence at the Construction camp detention center used for younger men and women and children. February 26, 2012, on Christmas Island, Australia. Pho... -
Photo: Quinn Makabe played by Thapelo Mokoena in the TV drama of Trackers by Deon Meyer Encountering postapartheid Afrikaans fiction for the first time, particularly the fast-pac... -
Photo: Rene Böhmer / Unsplash A polyhedron of blond leather. Thirty-two by seventeen by twelve. Solid handle, brass hooks, wide belt, reinforced external corners, hand-sewn. Inside, top, a str... -
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... -
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 f... -
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 f... -
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 r... -
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... -
Basque poet and bertsolari winner Maialen Lujanbio during the 2017 Bertsolari Grand Championship. Photo: Dani Blanco / Wikimedia In Basque and other minority-language traditions i... -
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... -
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 It... -
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... -
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-... -
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 especial... -
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, the... -
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 translat... -
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.... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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 rewr... -
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 Moro... -
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...
