In Redolent Rush, a recent short fiction collection published by Hawakal, based in New Delhi, India, we have nineteen short stories by Indian authors collected for the purpose of documenting…
Book Reviews
- January 9, 2024
- September 26, 2023I Narain’s home state of Uttar Pradesh / Reality Images / Adobe Stockt is a grim reality that many important Indian poets are not yet known by the anglophone readers spread across the globe, sadly, be…
- September 20, 2023In Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023), Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes an urgent tribute for Ukraine, the same urgency she employed when putting together her Ukraine antho…
- August 22, 2023The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in…
- August 16, 2023There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable…
- July 18, 2023Photo by Finan Akbar / UnsplashLife Ceremony (Grove Press, 2022) marks the third translation—once again expertly rendered into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori—of recent works by Sayaka Mur…
- July 12, 2023Roman floor mosaic with scene from the Odyssey / Photo by Jamie Heath / FlickrIn Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II (Palg…
- July 11, 2023Zuzanna Ginczanka in April 1938 / Muzeum Literatury / East NewsHistory displaced Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) from birth. Born in Kiev a few days after the outbreak of the October 1917 Bolshevik revo…
- July 5, 2023Edouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), oil on canvas, 252 × 305 cm, Kunsthalle Mannheim / WikipediaPerched grandly and Viennese-pretty on a rocky promontory just north…
- June 15, 2023Photo by Kelly Sikkema / UnsplashJem Bendell is a known scholar on societal collapse who rose to prominence in 2018 with his academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy…
- April 10, 2023And these things, that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting, they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” The author of twenty-fi…
- March 27, 2023Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel / Unsplash What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our…
- March 15, 2023As a reviewer who is fluent in both English and Russian, I approach the reading of such works as Alexander Veytsman’s «Демография дремлющих душ» / A Succession of Somnolent Souls (Im Press/M…
- February 6, 2023Photo by Carolina Garcia Tavizon on Unsplash When Manuel Ulacia drowned at the age of forty-eight in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico near Ixtapa-Zihuatenejo in 2001 (pulled out to sea by a…
- January 24, 2023Courtesy of oscarhokeah.com Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin, 2022) begins with a family tree. Names are stitched together, threading out four generations of a family. T…
- January 18, 2023Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash Do you get jabbed by a question that seemingly appears ceaseless? Bob Dylan’s song “Watching the River Flow” hints at a matter bound to raise a query. The point is: …
- December 12, 2022Photo by Kari Gunter-Seymour / www.karigunterseymourpoet.com “So much here depends” begins a line in a poem from Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new collection, alone in the house of my h…
- December 8, 2022To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.—Octavio Paz This quote aptly fits an anthology I came across that goes by the title Converse: Contempora…
- November 14, 2022Through the lens of a notorious murder case, Italian writer Nicola Lagioia paints a grim portrait of the city of Rome and its “desperate” youth and explores the reasons why ordinary people do mon…
- July 12, 2022Photo by Lee Winder / Flickr According to Christian Authier, himself a prizewinning novelist and recently the author of Houellebecq politique (Flammarion, 2022), Michel Houellebecq is “uncon…
- June 28, 2022Shadab Zeest Hashmi I first met Shadab Zeest Hashmi at AWP in March 2019, when we both participated in a panel of Pakistani American poets writing in English. On a rainy night, she and her sons came…
- June 15, 2022Photo by Rhett Wesley / Unsplash Contemporary femininity promises power to those who secure the public gaze by going viral on YouTube. But what does it mean to be visible in this particular way? How…
- May 31, 2022Photo by www.Florida-Guidebook.com / Unsplash In memory of José Vázquez Amaral “Movement, I want to show, is something that multilingual writing and translation have in common. Both are flui…
- April 27, 2022Written by one of Russia’s best-known horror writers, Anna Starobinets, Look at Him (Three String Books, 2020) is an unusual book: it reads partly as a memoir and partly as a journalistic in…
- April 19, 2022Photo by Daniel on Unsplash Readers will naturally and, perhaps, unfortunately, wish to make connections between Sayaka Murata’s (b. 1979) newest novel, Earthlings, translated by Ginny Taple…
