LITERARY TRANSLATION IS A mysterious form of writing that I love for its mandate: rewrite a Russian book in English so it represents the author’s Russian text. There’s no plotting. No…
In Every Issue
Photo: Ethan Hoover/Flickr AMONG THE ELITE East Coast cities, Philadelphia is often overlooked in favor of such coastal metropolises as New York and Boston. At first glance,…
The arts center is serene compared to the streets outside. Photo: Jaipur Beat Digital Magazine JAWAHAR KALA KENDRA (JKK), जवाहर कला केन्द्र, Jaipur’s art center, could be con…
Sigrid Nunez The Friend Riverhead Books D o the books we need find us? A few months ago, I purchased a used copy of Sigrid Nunez’s seventh novel, The Friend. The inside jacket pr…
Clare-Hope Ashitey in Seven Seconds More than one critic has proclaimed that television in the early twenty-first century is in a “Golden Age” in which the complexities of character and p…
HORROR COMES IN many forms and from all over the world. Whether it’s psychological horror that invites us to confront our deepest fears or biohorror that anticipates humanity’s gene…
Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Ondrej Pospisil/Flickr Few things create a literary moment as reliably as a road trip, and it is common knowledge that road trips and books pair up like fine wine and aged…
Librería Ulíses in Santiago de Chile. Photo courtesy of Librería Ulíses. I ARRIVED IN Santiago de Chile on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon in early December 2016, too trav…
Photo: Kalpna Chitnis-Singh HOW FORTUNATE IT IS to be born in a small town in the eastern state of Bihar, India, I learned only when I once went to seek the blessings of a hi…
Photo: Tyler McElroyWHEN THINKING OF San Diego, most people imagine palm trees, sand, and ocean breeze. Over thirty-five million tourists visit the city each year, and most come…
Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and PlaceEd. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed EditionsIn many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the ide…
Photo: evelyn/PexelsOn November 25, 2018, a new book prize for crime novels where “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered” will be awarded for the first time. The Staunch P…
WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action…
Kimberly Richardson from Kira Obolensky’s Park and Lake. Photo © Paula Keller. Photo courtesy of Ten Thousand Things Theater Company.THE THEATER OFFERS a rich experience of immersive sto…
Svalbard Photo: mariusz kluzniak/FlickrA YEAR AGO I TOOK A TRIP to Svalbard, the nearest inhabited archipelago to the North Pole. I was there to work with the Libyan poet Ashur E…
IT'S A RUNNING JOKE that Nagoya is the most boring city in Japan, and at first glance it seems like there’s some truth to it. It’s not the flashy Tokyo, the bustling merchant cit…
Photos: Erin DonnellyWhile Buenos Aires is primarily known for Maradona, the tango, and some of the tastiest steak in the world, for me it will always be the city of books. The booming literary scene…
Hummingbirds Between the PagesChris ArthurOhio State University Press (2018)Chris Arthur’s most recent collection of essays, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, makes a compelling argument on beh…
Photo: Richard Burger/FlickrGiven the years of apprenticeship that most professional writers put in, it is not surprising that notable persons in sports, politics, and other fields rarely have the tim…
ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I read as a teen was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was transported into a fantastical world that could occur by simply wal…
Norwegian musicians Bernt Jansen and Nils Kvaale Rue perform bass and vocals in Jørn Lande and Trond Holter’s Dracula—Swing of Death. Photo: Boris DanielsenROCK OPERA i…
Photo: Eric Kilby/FlickrUrsula Andkjær Olsen is one of Denmark’s most important contemporary poets. A poets’ poet and a critics’ darling, she won the prestigious literary award Montanaprisen in 2013 f…
Photo: Tony WebsterOn April 21, 2016, a chain-link fence in a Minneapolis suburb became a monument. At Paisley Park in Chanhassen, purple flowers and balloons, stuffed animals, handwritten signs, and…
Photo: Alana Marie Levinson LaBrosse In the Kurdish language the word kashkul describes a Sufi’s traditional begging bowl. Over time, the term evolved to also describe a commonplace…
Illustration by Stephanie Kubo The conventional wisdom in publishing for many years has been that women read and men don’t. Market research shows that men, on the whole, read for work, concentrat…