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Photo by Yousef Al-AbdullahWith her latest book of essays, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (2022), Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi offers a “resistance readi…
Daniel Simon
BOOKS REMAIN one of the great achievements of the human experiment. Over the millennia, the seismic shifts that began with the rise of languages, consolidation of the alphabet, and Gutenberg’s inventi…
The editors would like to acknowledge a generous subvention for this issue from the University of Oklahoma’s Romanoff Center for Russian Studies. We are especially grateful to Co-Directors Emily D. Jo…
December 14, 2022Photo by Hans Eiskonen / Unsplash Fresh off our delight in seeing Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem “Fireflies” in the Pushcart Prize XLVII anthology, the editors of Wo…
IN HIS SPEECH accepting the 2022 Neustadt Prize, Boubacar Boris Diop listed several of his intellectual and literary mentors: Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Cheik…
All of this // is a conjuring. . . . There is evidence everywhere. – Ada Limón, “The Hurting Kind” SEVERAL OF MY favorite poems in The Hurting Kind…
Anna Badkhen Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays New York Review Books Bright Unbearable Reality is a book of micro and macro scales: piscine, tidal, musical,…
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories. –…
August 3, 2022Photo by Sofia Simon In his poem called “The Man on the Dump” (1938), Wallace Stevens writes: “Days pass like papers from a press.” Stevens, who was in his late fiftie…
July 18, 2022When the forecast for the next ten days promises afternoon highs ranging from 102 to 111 degrees, you can bet I’ll be looking for really thick books to pile high for as much shade, and diversi…
when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough. – Ilya Kaminsky, “We Live…
a dark angel flies with a shofar playing his trumpet in flight – Boris Khersonsky HOW IS IT possible to think about art during a time of war? Years before the Russia…
I think there is something transformative about living through, liberating yourself and evolving past your brutish histories. – Saba Sebhatu, “Final Landing” PRIOR…
WHAT DOES A Babylonian epic—which dates to the twenty-first century bce in its earliest preserved versions—have to say to readers of world literature in the twenty-first c…
Say eros in translation, say I want to be translated by you. – Sawako Nakayasu, Say Translation Is Art ARABIC, CHINESE, FRENCH, Hebrew, Ikyaushi, Italian…
You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit. – Edward W. Said, “The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’” IN ITS…
Spectators heading toward Greenwood on June 1, 1921 / Courtesy of the University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library Just published by the University of Oklahoma Press, The 1921 Tulsa Race Ma…
We were never meant to survive. – Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” (1978) Amid the destruction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—the white assault on the city’s Green…
December 11, 2020Theodore Ziolkowski in 1992 / Photo by Robert Matthews, Princeton University Our strolls through the cemeteries of Berlin, then, are no more funereal and depressing than, say, the perform…
IT COULD BE ARGUED that World Literature Today (still) exists because of the Neustadt Prize, not the other way around. In the mid-1960s, some Universi…
Hope is the work that we must do, so much work to fix this. – Eïrïc R. Durändal-Stormcrow, “Don’t Suicide” In his poem “Impromptu,” written while walking…
August 27, 2020This week marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. Karlos K. Hill’s new book, The Murder of Emmett Till, retells and recontextualizes the story…
Lauren Camp Took House Tupelo Press I will speak of this wind . . . of the seams of desire. —Lauren Camp, “Remember It Was” The Greek mytho…
We’ll want to know what happened, and why—not just the factual whys . . . but the why of the human psyche. – Rilla Askew, “Cataclysm” ON THE C…
We look through the glass to see each other, but from certain angles we catch the glint of our own reflection. – Rachel Ang IF LIT MAGS sketch the “first dr…
