India’s Paul Zacharia, after five decades perfecting the art of the short story in the Malayalam language, spoken in the state of Kerala, has published his first novel, A Secret History of Compas…
Book Reviews
January 30, 2020
January 27, 2020Jurij Koch / Courtesy of Domowina-Verlag In the 1950s, a girl whom Jurij Koch knew in high school moved away from their hometown of Cottbus in East Germany. It was a case, he says in his recent memoi…
January 22, 2020Photo by Michael Gaida / Pixabay “Health is whatever works and for as long.” This phrase, a quote from a poem by Dr. John Stone (poet-cardiologist), was announced to our literature and medicine class…
January 16, 2020How is Judith Summerfield’s account of the stories she heard from her father meaningful to us, since we each have a story to tell about our own life? In the twelve chapters of A Man Comes from Som…
January 14, 2020Karl Schlögel has a profound, even intuitive understanding of Russian domestic and foreign politics. His view reaches both far into the past and projects likely future developments. He recognizes that…
December 5, 2019Shalev photo (left)– Das blaue Sofa / Club Bertelsmann The pain has returned—in Zeruya Shalev’s latest novel, Pain (Other Press, 2019)—“like labor pains, [its waves] come every minute or two…
November 5, 2019My association with the work of Józef Wittlin started when Professor Anna Frajlich invited me to write a paper about Wittlin’s association with France for her 1996 Józef Wittlin conference at Columbi…
October 28, 2019Many poets, writers, and thinkers have dwelled on the meaning of poetry following great tragedy, with Theodor Adorno’s claim that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism an…
October 23, 2019Georg Rafisch, “headless,” 2015 / Flickr When I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I made a point of stopping in San Francesco a Ripa whenever I was running errands. The church houses Bern…
August 21, 2019Readers of Natalia Ginzburg’s masterful autobiographical novel Family Lexicon (1963; Eng. 2017) will welcome New Directions’ 2019 reissues of her novels The Dry Heart (1947; Eng. 19…
August 20, 2019Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 CE), “How to Read” 論語集注, in Sishu jizhu 四書集注, Sibu beiyao edition (National University of Singapore) In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton Un…
August 12, 2019Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers of ori…
July 24, 2019Amit Chaudhuri. Photo by Geoff Pugh. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (New York Review Books, 2019), follows a version of the author in the years prior to the book’s public…
July 18, 2019Photo by Ethan Chiang / Flickr Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology (Cambria Press, 2018) is a collection of short stories in translation featuring contemporary Taiwanese aut…
July 3, 2019Ever since early Islam, Jews have been dubbed the people of the book. The title stuck in European lands too, a deferential nod to the role of the Hebrew Bible in the Western canon, the breadth of Jew…
June 27, 2019Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Ghazal Cosmopolitan: The Culture and Craft of the Ghazal (Jacar Press, 2017), a melding of personal and craft essays, qasidas, and, of course, ghazals, functions as a k…
June 13, 2019Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.…
June 4, 2019Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a woman con…
May 30, 2019Photo: Greenwich Photography / Flickr The title of Ognjen Spahić’s Head Full of Joy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), which won the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature, underscores its brut…
May 28, 2019Photo by Eirik Newth / Flickr In late 2018, India’s highest literary honor was awarded to Anees Salim’s fourth novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants (Penguin India, 2015). The novel i…
May 21, 2019Stare Dam, a small loch located on the southern edge of Birnam Wood in Central Perth and Kinross, Scotland / Photo by ShinyPhotoScotland / Flickr José Manuel Cardona’s collection Birnam Wood / El…
April 18, 2019Carne de mi carne: Antología de cuento (Plural Editores, 2018; Flesh of my flesh: Short-story anthology), is a collection of short stories inspired by the philosophical underpinnings of Mary…
March 12, 2019Sylvia Plath standing beside her bicycle, Marblehead, Massachusetts, July 24, 1951. Plath, who was eighteen at the time, and her Smith College roommate, Marcia Brown (later Marcia B. Stern), served a…
February 12, 2019Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash Through a wealth of examples across disciplines, from novels, and from personal experience, Svend Erik Larsen’s Literature and the Experience of Globalization…
January 31, 2019Photo by Martin Lewison / Flickr When Convenience Store Woman came out in 2016, Murata Sayaka (b. 1979) won the Akutagawa Prize, usually the imprimatur of potential for a new writer. This wa…
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…
