Photo courtesy of Castle Rock Entertainment / RGR Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
From the Middle Ages to Seinfeld, schlemiel and schlimazel characters enjoy an interesting history. Veronica Esposi…
In Every Issue
Arpino, Cicero’s birthplace, is about 100 kilometers southeast of Rome. These studies [of literature] are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comf…
Photo courtesy of Green Feather Books Spring in Oklahoma can be unpredictable, with sweltering heat, severe storms, and even cold snaps. With continual changes in the weather, you…
Javier Fuentes’s debut novel, Countries of Origin, finds pastry chef Demetrio leaving the US and returning to his birth country, Spain. On the flight to Madrid, he meets Jacobo, which begins a will-th…
Dolores and Walter Neustadt in 2014 | Photo by Shevaun Williams The World Literature Today organization and the University of Oklahoma have lost a dear friend. Dolores K. (Dottie) Neustad…
See something once, and you see it everywhere. In Quito’s old town it was geraniums: on the curly-whirly balconies, in the porticoes of the old baroque buildings, and the great open squares, there wer…
Prince Shakur When They Tell You to Be Good Tin House This debut memoir made many best-of-fall lists and won the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award. Shakur’s memoir charts his political coming of age,…
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817), oil on canvas, 119.5 x 99.5 x 9 cm bpk Bildagentur / Hamburger Kunsthalle, SHK / Elke Walford / Art Resource, NY What is sehns…
Photos courtesy of the author It’s a long way from Manhattan Island to King George Island—actually, it’s an epic trip from anywhere to Antarctica—and the wise traveler needs to make a stop, prefer…
Photos courtesy of the author During a recent trip to the Netherlands, my family and I visited Amsterdam—an obvious stop—and found it stunning, the elaborate architecture contrast…
Whitman Road, Nebraska Sandhills | Photo © Michael Forsberg | www.michaelforsberg.com Sometimes referred to as “flyover states,” the states of the middle US are home to much worth seeing, includin…
Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s first collection of short stories, Happy Stories, Mostly, was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and published, in Tiffany Tsao’s English translation, in…
Herewith a list of recent books about illness and disability and the transformative changes that happen to us during these journeys with the body. Some of these works are fictional, and others are mem…
Jane Wong’s memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is a “story of lost enterprises”—for example, her family’s restaurant—but it’s also a story of a tender sibling relationship, a strong and comfort…
Perpetually Demolished, Perpetually Renewed by Dana Gioia Los Angeles is an impossible city to describe, even for natives. Make any assertion about the place, and the opposite will…
So many books, so little time—even in the summer. Of the many new choices, here are six that caught our eye, a handful of fiction and nonfiction that promises reflection, adventure, and, yes, even fun…
In her new, ongoing column, Veronica Esposito highlights an untranslatable word—its history, its contemporary usage, and why it’s so hard to translate. To begin this new project, Esposito delves into…
In this remembrance with a recipe, a writer in California traces her inclination for growing back through her father and his father, a retired baker and confectioner from Syria. The San Francisco Ba…
“The French critic Albert Thibaudet proposed in one of his books on the novel a distinction between two kinds of reader: the liseur and the lecteur. I do not know whether a similar differentiating nua…
Since the invention of the printing press, it’s not been uncommon for publishers—whether large international operations like Italy’s Rizzoli or small, scrappy independents like Deep Vellum in Dallas,…
I like this little area of my library a lot because it’s where I keep some of my horror books: H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Mariana Enríquez, Amparo Dávila, Shirley Jackson. I also like that th…
Beacon Press published Aaron Caycedo-Kimura’s collection Common Grace in 2022. A poet and visual artist, his paintings have appeared in galleries across Connecticut. Q Who are the poets we should b…
Photo by Jesse Ditmar In Take What You Need, Idra Novey’s third novel, a woman who fled her childhood in the Allegheny Mountains endures an uneasy return when her stepmother, Jean, dies. There in…
THE ERASURE of spomeniks began little more than a decade after Marshal Tito’s death in 1980. The president of Yugoslavia had commissioned the construction of these Space Age monumen…
An ancient Babylonian recipe for cooking turnips survived in one of the three cuneiform tablets dating from around 1700 BC. THIS IS A SUBSTANTIAL DISH of a creamy vegetable…