Having just spent a year in Berlin, novelist Claire Messud reports on her observations in and around the city. “In Berlin,” she writes, “a sense of becoming trumps a sense of bel…
Essays
- “If the law permeates our lives before we are born, reaching even into the womb, so too do stories, guaranteeing that law and literature will remain intimate bedfellows in the years to come.” Deji…
- The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and…
- Sudden, Flash, Nano, Short-Short, Micro, Minificción . . . "I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish;…
- Photo by Pesis/FLIKR Under the sign of the bicycle, writers and riders share a special affinity. Alon Raab offers a global literary tour. Bicycles: because lo…
- "Science fiction works differentially from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. . . . It has its own particular ways of making sense out of langua…
- Scenes from Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, directed by Susan ShaughnessyUniversity of OklahomaMarch 10–14, 2012 Photos: Ty Johnson / …
- London is peppered with the grotesque. Is this a revival of a Dickensian past, Johnny Depp style, or are we creating a new carnivalesque? From pickled sharks to supermodel yoga, how close must you…
- A map showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946-2010. http://www.jvpchicago.org/resources/brief-history Like all Palestinians who have lived in historic Palestine since its fragmentation in 1948…
- For more, see the gallery of [node:674 title"Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadsides"]. In March 2007 a car-bomb suicide attack destroyed the entire perimeter of Al-Mutanabbi Street, the heart a…
- The first time I spoke with Anthony Shadid was over the phone in September of last year, while driving north on Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Stillwater. I can't recall where in the world of…
- Tezuka Osamu spent the first two decades of his career entertaining Japanese children with his manga like Tetsuwan Atomu, but the rigors of being Japan's most visible creative public icon…
- LEFT: Femi Osofisan (Okinba Launko), a Nigerian playwright, poet, translator, critic, and theorist of literature, is also a regular columnist in Nigeria's leading newspapers. http://f…
- In Argentinian literature of the 1920s and 1930s, Jorge Luis Borges’s imagined topography of Buenos Aires was key to positioning Argentine culture at the same level as European and American cultur…
- Left: Rosa Motero, photo by Violeta Lama. Right: Empar Moline, photo by Jordi Play. Of the many trends in literary journalism today, the use of humor to convey sociocultural critiques continues to…
- In a ceremony on February 27, 2010, presided over by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the Coordinator of the Council On Communication and Citizenshi…
- Are science and poetry inherently at odds with one another? Poet and cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam explores the nature of interactions between these two disciplines.…
- The meeting ground between science and literature has never been so busy. Not only have the last few years seen a proliferation of anthologies such as Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired…
- The landscape of southern AlbaniaPhoto (c) 2006 by John K. Cox Since the end of communism and the revival of old customs and compulsions, ten thousand people have died from blood fe…
- An interloper in a male world, Yrsa Roca Fannberg in her Barcelona FC watercolors paints the "ordinary gestures" that the experts often ignore. Female Control by Yrsa Roca Fannber…
- The waves of mass killing that swept across the old Mitteleuropa during the 1930s and ’40s are neither forgotten nor ignored by twenty-first-century writers. Four recent novels illustrate this con…
- Listening suggestion: While reading Camp's essay, listen to Louis Armstrong’s version of the Fats Waller song “Black and Blue," available for streaming on YouTube. Can a writer ever hope to success…
- For three days in November 2011, fifteen women writers gathered in Oaxaca City, Mexico, filling a colonial apartment next door to a church dedicated to the Virgin of Solitude. These woman are all—by…
- ¡Ay! diidxazá, diidxazá diidxa'rusibani naa, naa nanna zanítilu dxi guiniti gubidxa cá. Oh, Zapotec, dear Zapotec language that gives me life, I know you will not dieuntil the sun's demise.– Gabriel L…
- The following essay is adapted from a talk given at the symposium honoring Han Shaogong, winner of the 2011 Newman Prize for Children’s Literature, at the University of Oklahoma in February 2011.…
December 12, 2023
October 24, 2023
