Photo: Serge LAROCHE/Flickr
TWO HOURS BY TRAIN from the capital in Lisbon and midway to Porto in the country’s northern quarter, Coimbra is home to Portugal’s oldest university. The…
In Every Issue
With a two-week driving vacation ahead of her this summer, Managing and Culture Editor Michelle Johnson is already setting aside books for the trip—plus a few to read poolside when she returns. …
Eddie Muller, the host of “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, has what just might be the ideal job. TCM is a cultural gem, a visual museum airing silent and foreign movies, curious tra…
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of a warming planet when the causes of the warming are so big, so systemic, they’re difficult to even think about, let alone fully understand? Where scientific…
Creative cross-stitch by Tiffany Marie inspired by Button poet Neil Hilborn’s “Our Numbered Days” OFTEN WHEN I ASK people what they think of poetry, their first thought is of the fam…
Aleksandra Tsibulia. A PROFESSOR ONCE COMPLAINED to me that American students struggle to learn Russian because English, as a language, is too selfish. “You’re obsessed with the I…
Thomas More's Utopia painted on a building originally planned for demolition. Photo: Kayla E. Ciardi HEADING EAST ON Riverside Walk, you will see an old building tucked away…
PHOTO: Antonio Tajuelo NESTLED IN TŌKYŌ'S Chiyoda Ward is Jinbōchō, a quieter side of the city that stands in sharp contrast with the frenetic energy of central Tōky…
Camille LaurensLittle Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’s Masterpiece Trans. Willard Wood Other PressCamille Laurens’s…
PHOTOS, clockwise from top: Members of AIEP in front of Ernest Hemingway’s house in 1994. AIEP dinner in Reykjavík. Group photo in Unna, Germany. CIRCUMSTANCES WERE QUITE different i…
WHEN WE SAY “Russian literature” we think about the classics, but contemporary Russian-language writing is as vibrant as it is geographically and politically diverse. Within the Russi…
THE VIDEO-SHARING platform YouTube has developed entirely new ways to form communities and proliferate ideas, and among those on the rise is the phenomenon of booktubers. Booktubers…
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…
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, its roug…
The arts center is serene compared to the streets outside. Photo: Jaipur Beat Digital MagazineJAWAHAR KALA KENDRA (JKK), जवाहर कला केन्द्र, Jaipur’s art center, could be considered an…
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 promis…
Clare-Hope Ashitey in Seven SecondsMore 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 plot,…
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 genet…
Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Ondrej Pospisil/FlickrFew 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 chee…
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 travel-we…
Photo: Kalpna Chitnis-SinghHOW 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 highly…
Photo: Tyler McElroy WHEN 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 for…
Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed Editions In many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the…
Photo: evelyn/Pexels On 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…
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 of b…