Like Little Women on an ayahuasca trip, Tehrangeles is delightfully twisted and heartfelt. If you set a TikTok mukbang at a Crazy Rich Persian wedding, you’d still have a long way to…
Varia
An epistolary symposium devoted to “The World’s Worst Book” appeared in the Winter 1941 issue. The following Proustian riposte, or “riproust,” came from Channing Pollock.…
“Because I teach literature at the university level,” remarks Pierre Bayard as he launches the argument in his most recent book, superbly translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, “there is, in…
Our columnist reviews a range of translations of the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, looking at how book cover design can change from language to language.One of the fasci…
As a book review editor, I would describe my relationship with writing designed to sell books as something of a bombardment. I have great respect for publicists and the work they do, but doing what I…
Photo by Alessandro / Stock.adobe.com Emil Lucka on Critics: A Little Lower Than the Angels“Up to this point we have not dealt with the absolute quality of the work under consideration. In this con…
Photo 1 by Mahmoud Muna / All other photos by Yousef KhanfarI judge a city not by its skyscrapers, highways, or monuments but by the quiet hum of its people, the soul of its art, and the sweet scent o…
Photo by Feodor Chistyakov / Unsplash.com The image of the translator is often that of the lonely, intrepid soul working endless hours, accompanied only by stacks of books, but our columnist th…
hoto of Oaxacan parade by victorfotomx / Stock.adobe.com Our guide, Ayumi, is wrapping up a three-hour walking tour of the Mexican city of Oaxaca when she grins and says, “And my final advice is: i…
Photo of Liberty Books at Peregrine Farmstall Tiny bookstores are thriving across South Africa. J. L. Powers offers a guided tour of some of her favorites.As the Atlantic Ocean gives…
The “Open Book” of Odysseus ElytisElytis served on the 1972 Neustadt Prize jury, which chose Gabriel García Márquez for the award. His nominee was the French writer Claude Simon.…
Xalapa is the capital of the eastern state of Veracruz and home to one of the richest treasures of Mexico’s Gulf Coast Mesoamerican heritage: the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa. Opened in 1986, the M…
Illustration by ilbusca / iStock.com Veronica Esposito looks at the strangely fascinating imagery authors have used to describe self-translation and the battle between two languages, from Jhump…
The Alley of Writers. Photo by Farhodjon Chinberdiev / Unsplash.com You see a lot from a train window, and after a few days of railing through Uzbekistan, I detected a nationwide fondness for ceram…
Especially in winter, but in all seasons, a handful of poetry collections, within arm’s length, reach out to me. I find myself returning to these more frequently than others, for some…
A Review of The Indian Literatures of Today: A Symposium, by Bharatan Kumarappa (International Book House, 1947)“This volume contains sixteen addresses which give short résumés of the histori…
The editors are delighted to announce that the following books received the most votes in our writers’ and readers’ poll, in descending order:Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear…
Photos courtesy of the Old Bookstore / flateyribookstore.com Flateyri welcomed me in the late afternoon, the daylight already giving way to those delicate northern blues that stretch across the Wes…
In spring 2021 the editors invited twenty-one writers to nominate a single book, published since the year 2000, that had had a major influence on their own work. We published the longlist…
Photo by kiwisoul / Stock.adobe.com In Almaty, people read everywhere, bookstores are plentiful, and the Kazakh language, engaged in a “lingual fracas” with Russian, is reasserting itself.…
Photo of New York City by Kevin / Stock.adobe.com What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel th…
Tranströmer receiving the Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma in 1990 A Review of Tomas Tranströmer’s Tolkningar (Bonniers, 1999)“When Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), one of Sweden…
To reach Nuria, you must traverse the crowded streets of central Nairobi, dodging motorcycles and weaving in and out of traffic. From the street, you’ll enter Bazaar Plaza—a large, stone-gra…
Photo of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town by ilyas Ayub / Alamy.com Taking the measure of Cape Town’s many contradictions, a visiting writer also discerns its manifold richness. One morning, twenty-four…
Illustration by William Wallace Denslow from The Wizard of Oz, 1900 / Wikimedia Our columnist looks at the smallest language on earth—both deliberately simple and full of ambiguity—and…