Photo: Malte Wingen / Unsplash
YOU FIND YOURSELF looking for a new book to read. You pick up a novel with a captivating cover, nice. After the first few chapters the protagonist seem…
In Every Issue
ALTHOUGH I'VE SPENT most of my life in large cities, I’ve long been attracted to mystery novels set in more remote areas. Something about the isolated atmospheres of small towns—somet…
Photo: Hayley Mechelle / Flickr WHEN THE NARRATOR of Bibiana Camacho’s “The Other Woman” compares the face reflected in her mirror with the face on her work ID, she muses, “Yes, we l…
Photo: Museum aan de Stroom. Fred Romero / Flickr THE FIRST CITY most people think about when they hear of Belgium is Brussels. This I sincerely regret—not that I want to badmouth my…
Photo: Ella Parsons Nestled in a tiny courtyard shared by the Berkeley Press Bookstore and the adjacent classical music store, Cafe Ohlone is a thriving cultural center for the Ohlone tribe. In spite…
Paolo CognettiThe Wild Boy Trans. Erica Segre & Simon Carnell Washington Square Press / AtriaFEELING A BIT overburdened by the demands of civilized life but lacking t…
IN 2004 I was thinking about the way that the very American style of hard-boiled or “noir” detective story has spread around the world, even to languages and literatures that had not…
We’re often told, by impassioned librarians and insistent bibliophiles, to never judge a book by its cover. While it’s true that the most stylishly packaged novel can reveal poorly written language la…
BORDERS, OFTEN CONFUSED for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and fo…
Photo: Samuel Zeller / UnsplashIN HIS WORK on color symbolism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Florian Bast describes one of the typical reactions to trauma in the novel as “a rep…
Photo: Claudia Schillinger / Flickr THE COMMUNITY OF MADRID has been home to many peoples. From Celts and Romans to Visigoths and Moors, each group has left an impression on the culture that remains.…
Photo: Serge LAROCHE/Flickr TWO HOURS BY TRAIN from the capital in Lisbon and midway to Porto in the country’s northern quarter, Coimbra is home to Portugal’s oldest university. The…
With a two-week driving vacation ahead of her this summer, Managing and Culture Editor Michelle Johnson is already setting aside books for the trip—plus a few to read poolside when she returns. …
Eddie Muller, the host of “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, has what just might be the ideal job. TCM is a cultural gem, a visual museum airing silent and foreign movies, curious tra…
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of a warming planet when the causes of the warming are so big, so systemic, they’re difficult to even think about, let alone fully understand? Where scientific…
Creative cross-stitch by Tiffany Marie inspired by Button poet Neil Hilborn’s “Our Numbered Days” OFTEN WHEN I ASK people what they think of poetry, their first thought is of the fam…
Aleksandra Tsibulia. A PROFESSOR ONCE COMPLAINED to me that American students struggle to learn Russian because English, as a language, is too selfish. “You’re obsessed with the I…
Thomas More's Utopia painted on a building originally planned for demolition. Photo: Kayla E. Ciardi HEADING EAST ON Riverside Walk, you will see an old building tucked away…
PHOTO: Antonio Tajuelo NESTLED IN TŌKYŌ'S Chiyoda Ward is Jinbōchō, a quieter side of the city that stands in sharp contrast with the frenetic energy of central Tōky…
Camille LaurensLittle Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’s Masterpiece Trans. Willard Wood Other PressCamille Laurens’s…
PHOTOS, clockwise from top: Members of AIEP in front of Ernest Hemingway’s house in 1994. AIEP dinner in Reykjavík. Group photo in Unna, Germany. CIRCUMSTANCES WERE QUITE different i…
WHEN WE SAY “Russian literature” we think about the classics, but contemporary Russian-language writing is as vibrant as it is geographically and politically diverse. Within the Russi…
THE VIDEO-SHARING platform YouTube has developed entirely new ways to form communities and proliferate ideas, and among those on the rise is the phenomenon of booktubers. Booktubers…
LITERARY TRANSLATION IS A mysterious form of writing that I love for its mandate: rewrite a Russian book in English so it represents the author’s Russian text. There’s no plotting. No…
Photo: Ethan Hoover/Flickr AMONG THE ELITE East Coast cities, Philadelphia is often overlooked in favor of such coastal metropolises as New York and Boston. At first glance, its roug…