Photo courtesy of Sholeh Wolpé
“Much of the most interesting postrevolutionary fiction being written in Persian is by women, and Shahrnush Parsipur is one of the bright lights among them. First is…
In Every Issue
Photo courtesy of Second Story Books, Washington, DC / secondstorybooks.com In a world where literature and politics collide, Second Story Books fits perfectly in the middle of it all. With…
I’m worried for us. Humanity is on a collision course with annihilation, and most people don’t seem terribly bothered. Granted, we’re a species hardwired to survive and don’t like to look at our demis…
Photo by ink drop / Stock.adobe.com Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in…
Photo of Bordeaux, France by JackF / Stock.adobe.com In December 1801 the poet Friedrich Hölderlin accepted a position as tutor at the Bordeaux residence of German wine merchant Daniel Christoph M…
Photo by Sergi Reboredo / Alamy Stock Photo Escaping the Khmer Rouge, Chantha Nguon’s family moved to Saigon, where they lived as refugees. There, restoring flavor to the drab palate of their live…
Photo courtesy of Victor Adewale / OlongoAfrica “This distinguished Nigerian playwright’s account [Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died] of his prolonged season in hell as a detainee of the Federal Governm…
Photo courtesy of Søren Solkær, Black Sun #149, Rome, Italy We could not resist sharing this remarkable photograph. Søren Solkær (b. 1969) is a Danish photographer. After completing his d…
Photo of Oklahoma City by Gerson Repreza / Unsplash.com A cliché about Oklahoma City and Oklahoma in the national imagination is that it is a place to be passed through. In stories of th…
Photo by Reiseuhu and Katia De Juan / Unsplash.com Literature can change the way we celebrate. The bull-running and fighting of Spain’s San Fermin festival was just a local affair before Hemingway…
No sense can be made of the unspeakable horrors and injustices Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to over the course of the last few months—to say nothing of the last century.…
Photos of Handley Cellars Painted Mural at the AV Historical Museum courtesy of Courtney DeGraff / Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association / avwines.com In her column for this issue, Veronica…
“This article began with a zombie. Had it not been for the zombie, I wouldn’t have opened the way I did, nor said what I am about to say, nor compared what I am about to compare. I would have written…
Photos by Laura Hernandez Nestled on a quiet street in the Cordón neighborhood of Montevideo, Uruguay, is Escaramuza, a combination bookstore, café, and cultural events center. With ornate tile fl…
As a tween, I was solely allowed to read whatever was “true”; stories found in nonfiction historical narratives, biographies, zoography, and travelogues. While the emotional truths one finds in fictio…
Photo by Jacob Boomsma / istockphoto.com In the Toronto airport, a young woman moved her bag from a seat so that someone might sit down. “You can sit here, eh. I’m from Brandon, in ‘Friendly Manit…
Photo of Kim Yuna, courtesy of UPI / Alamy Stock Photo / Molly Riley Is this idea of mass frustration distinctly Korean, or is it more international in scope? In her ongoing column on untranslata…
Photo of the Wales Millennium Centre / Jonny Gios / Unsplash.com Hear the seagulls? They carouse all over the city, cawing about the places they’ve been beyond Wales. That’s always the way of it i…
“Between the political mentality and the pure intellect there are inevitable differences. The political mind seeks to dominate the relative or the accidental, as the navigator, expert in winds and the…
Photo courtesy of the Cheikh Bookstore There are very few historical bookstores to be found in Algeria, and one of them is the Cheikh Bookstore (Librairie Cheikh) located in Tizi…
Photo by Javier Santos Guzmán on Unsplash Speeding on a packed rush-hour Metrobus from La Bombilla (Lightbulb) station for Chilpancingo (Wasp), I suddenly imagined myself as one of countless urban…
Photo by Rodrigo Jardón Jazmina Barrera’s first novel, Cross-Stitch, translated by Christina MacSweeney, is an engrossing story of three friends as they come of age in Mexico City and while travel…
Photo by Angela Blankenship In Etaf Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, a young Palestinian American artist and mother of two contends with the effects of intergenerational trauma and her complicated re…
Maysaloun Faraj, The Orange, 2002. Four artists of Iraqi descent are achieving global recognition for their paintings and handbag design. Both proud of their culture of origin and open to…
While working on a new verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I discovered that skepticism toward my project tended to follow a specific trajectory. People who began with perhaps too much faith in…