Photo of Beena Kamlani by Dan Demetriad / beenakamlani.com
The historical novel The English Problem (Crown, 2025), by Beena Kamlani, narrates the story of a young man nam…
Book Reviews
-
January 22, 2026 -
January 21, 2026Long before I stepped into the dust of an archaeological trench as a professional, I was a student of architecture, mesmerized by the sketches of Altamira and Chauvet. At that time, I didn’t yet grasp… -
January 6, 2026Olinda Beja was born in the city of Guadalupe in 1946, on the island of São Tomé in the small equatorial archipelago country of São Tomé e Príncipe, a former Portuguese colony. She is the daughter of… -
December 11, 2025Adam Morgan / Photo by Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of Simon & Schuster Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to… -
November 25, 2025Hélène Dorion / Photo by Maxime G. Delisle / helenedorion.com Hélène Dorion is a major figure of contemporary French-Canadian literature. Foremost a poet, she is known for her deep con… -
November 18, 2025Akiyuki Nosaka / Wikipedia Akiyuki Nosaka’s (1930–2015) semi-autobiographical short story “Hotaru No Haka” (Grave of the Fireflies) is a searing portrayal of war, hunger, and the despe… -
November 12, 2025Noam Chomsky / Photo by Sam Usner / Haymarket Books While A Livable Future Is Possible (Haymarket Books, 2024 / Penguin Books, 2025) may be one of the most timidly worded… -
November 4, 2025Carlie Hoffman I have never been able to hear music in my voice so much as I have in reading the lyrical wonder of One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2… -
October 30, 2025The title of Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto & Windus, 2025), instantly reminds us of the famous opening of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishm… -
October 16, 2025Nancy Berg and Marc Saperstein, Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity (Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press… -
October 9, 2025Photo of Arturo Fontaine by Daniel Mordzinski / Courtesy of Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells In Y entonces Teresa (And then Teresa) (Catalonia, 2024), Arturo Fontaine (b… -
October 1, 2025Photo of José Luís Peixoto by Patricia Santos Pinto / Courtesy of MertinWitt Literarische Agentur Born in 1974 in the parish of Galveias, Portugal—in the southern region of Alentejo—José Lu… -
September 23, 2025There is a kind of natural unraveling in Kiriti Sengupta’s poetry that, while complex, feels as effortless as the silence after separation: provocatively serene as a Tagorean sketch, as playful as wor… -
September 11, 2025Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his 1813 lecture On the Different Methods of Translating, famously proposed that translators face two paths: to “leave the author in peace and move the reader tow… -
September 9, 2025Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950) was an acclaimed Indian novelist and short-story writer who wrote in Bangla. His international fame mostly rests on the popularity of his novels Pather Pan… -
August 18, 2025Carroll Beauvais / Photo courtesy of carrollbeauvais.com As a trauma therapist, I felt a deep chord strike inside of me while reading Carroll Beauvais’s debut collection of poems,… -
July 30, 2025Mohammed Choukri’s book Faces has finally been published in an exquisite translation by Jonas Elbousty. Published by Georgetown University Press, this translation is a continuation of th… -
July 23, 2025Melissa Weininger’s Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023) is a thought-provoking and hopeful book. Written during the… -
July 8, 2025Photo of Poniatowska by Pedrobautista – Own work, CC BY 3.0 Las siete cabritas (2000), the literal translation of which would be “The Seven Little Female Goats,” is the o… -
June 18, 2025Published in 2023, The Age of Lonelinesses is Asaad Zohrabi’s debut novel. Born in 1978 in Ravansar, Kermanshah, Iran, Zohrabi has already released four volumes of poetry. His first… -
June 4, 2025A centennial celebration of poet Nissim Ezekiel compiled by his daughter, poet Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Nissim Ezekiel, Poet and Father (Pippa Rann Books, 2024) consists of a collection… -
May 27, 2025Photo by Laurin Rinder / Adobe Stock Abdilatif Abdallah (b. 1946, Mombasa) is a major Swahili poet who was, until recently, largely unknown to English readers. A beautiful volume of hi… -
May 22, 2025Photo of Hon Lai Chu by Jeffy Lau In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines, 2025), intimacy becomes a matter of state policy. The Conjoinment Act… -
May 21, 2025Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite (2019), dir. Bong Joon Ho / Courtesy of IMDB If you have ever taken a writing class in Europe or North America (aka the West), you have likely h… -
May 12, 2025Amanda Hess / Photo by Loreto Caceres / Wikipedia If you have not yet read the writing of Amanda Hess, you have been depriving yourself of the most insightful commentary on our times.…
Recent Posts
Photo of Beena Kamlani by Dan Demetriad / beenakamlani.com
The historical novel The English Problem (Crown, 2025), by …
Long before I stepped into the dust of an archaeological trench as a professional, I was a student of architecture, mesmerized by the sketches of…
Photo by Chelsy Lyons
What do algorithmically boosted photographs do to places, or to the people who live in these places? Does…
The Clara Luper Teachers’ Institute cohort stands together beneath the portrait of civil rights pioneer Clara Luper, committed to teaching…
Kristi Williams works with a student at Black History Saturdays, the free monthly program she founded in Tulsa to teach Black history that…
