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
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Camille LaurensLittle Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’s Masterpiece Trans. Willard Wood Other PressCamille Laurens’s…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…