Background image: typescript of “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims,” by B. C Franklin / Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from Tul…
Book Reviews
May 24, 2021
May 11, 2021Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was shown as the premiere when the Forest Theatre in Gdańsk opened in 1911 / Photo by magro_kr / Flickr Anna Frajlich, who recently added to her long…
April 28, 2021Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków / Photo by annaspies / Flickr Piotr Florczyk’s From the Annals of Kraków (Lynx House Press, 2020) narrates the searing realization of an almost unnoticed abs…
February 3, 2021Photo by Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr The Gospel According to H. L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020) is an audacious book that foregrounds translation as a means of critiquing our understanding o…
January 11, 2021If Serbian poet and novelist Zvonko Karanović were a painter, he would be a surrealist. In the forty-one dark prose poems of Sleepwalkers on a Picnic, in English and Serbian parallel texts t…
December 16, 2020Margarita Liberaki Three Summers Trans. Karen Van Dyck NYRB Three Summers begins with a mystery. Katerina’s absent grandmother is an enigma to her family. Katerina fixates on this…
December 7, 2020Sonia Nimr / Source: TAMER Institute for Community Education This whirlwind adventure begins with protagonist Qamar’s birth and follows her life along the titular wondrous journeys around the Mediter…
October 27, 2020Mikhal Dekel / Photo by Nina Subin Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (Norton, 2019), Mikhal Dekel’s outstanding book, is many things: a memoir, a family genealogy, a history of…
October 14, 2020Helene Tursten An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good Soho Crime Trans. Marlaine Delargy I first picked up Swedish writer Helene Tursten’s collection of stories for its title and for its length; I…
October 6, 2020Lesley M.M. Blume / Photo © Oberto Gili / Courtesy of HMH Books “The opportunity to learn from history’s tragedies has not yet passed.”—Lesley Blume Released on the seventy-fifth an…
September 17, 2020Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection of flash, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), is a journey through desire’s relationship with the body: the exhaustion af…
August 17, 2020The tagline (or, in some cases, subtitle) of David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire reads simply: “A woman in trouble.” Of course, if you’ve seen that movie, it’s about a lot more than that,…
July 29, 2020What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection. John Willis’s Mni Wiconi / Water Is Lif…
July 2, 2020Photo by Ben Hershey / Unsplash John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season (Doubleday, 2020), probably e…
June 30, 2020Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice. A wa…
June 22, 2020Yu Miri / Courtesy of Zoom Japan Yu Miri first started researching the evictions of the homeless community in Tokyo’s Ueno Park back in 2006. Days or even hours before visits by the emperor and the i…
June 3, 2020Naoise Dolan probably wishes her debut novel, Exciting Times (Ecco, 2020), wasn’t so relevant. Although the book isn’t set during a global pandemic, it does include the many unsavory aspects…
May 6, 2020Neva Lukić / Courtesy of Cultural Institution Blesok The recent collection of short stories by Neva Lukić, Endless Endings (Bokeh, 2018), originally written in Croatian and translated into E…
April 23, 2020Left: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People (2020) / Courtesy of IMDB Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel is a meticulous observation, or even a study, of how one human being can have…
April 21, 2020The author at the Zakir Hussain Delhi College during the Bengali Literary Festival 2018 / Photo courtesy of bitanchakraborty.com Simplicity and quiet elegance never fail to impress us. The effect of…
April 9, 2020Mildred D. Taylor at the University of Oklahoma, October 24, 2003 / Photo by Robert Taylor Generations of American schoolchildren have grown up with Cassie Logan and her brothers, Stacey, Christopher…
March 10, 2020The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die (John Murray, 2019), by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, translated from the original Bangla by Arunava Sinha, is a fast-paced thriller about the rescue mission around the…
March 5, 2020Lafcadio Hearn in 1889 / Photo by Frederick Gutekunst Born in Greece in the mid-nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn shuffled between Ireland, the West Indies, and a few cities in America before landin…
February 11, 2020The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly.…
February 3, 2020On the cover of his latest book of prose poems, Suturas do Amor (Editorial Autor, 2019), Mozambican author Rudêncio Morais announces that he is a poeta falso or “false poet…
Recent Posts
Illustration by Shovo / Adobe StockI’m sitting on an exam table talking to a nurse practitioner about a pain in my lower left abdomen. I’ve only ever…
In Redolent Rush, a recent short fiction collection published by Hawakal, based in New Delhi, India, we have nineteen short stories by…
Epic Photos / Adobe StockAboard the North Star IX
December 26, 208. . .
My dear Celeste:
First, allow me to say that you were right, so many…
Maryam Lamei, Birds Are Gathered in God (2021) / Courtesy of the artist / www.maryamlamei.com
Searching for solace following the events…
Illustration by fran_kie / Adobe StockIf I Must Die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some…
