Many 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” (…
Book Reviews
October 28, 2019
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. Th…
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 (…
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…
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 layer…
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…
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…
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 Je…
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…
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…
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), f…
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, unders…
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 Indi…
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 Bi…
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), serv…
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 E…
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.…
January 15, 2019Loretta Collins Klobah / Courtesy of Peepal Tree Loretta Collins Klobah’s Ricantations (Peepal Tree, 2018) is her second collection of poetry. The book has been selected as a P…
January 10, 2019Enrapture Captivating Media / Unsplash What becomes a legend most? Great talent, suffering, and mystery . . . three ingredients that French poet Arthur Rimbaud possessed in spades.…
January 7, 2019Michael Bazzett / Courtesy of Milkweed Editions and the Star Tribune Long overdue, Michael Bazzett’s verse translation of The Popol Vuh (Milkweed Editions, 2018) does for the M…
December 18, 2018Photo by Eran Finkle / Flickr Jeff Talarigo’s third book, In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees (Etruscan Press, 2018), offers a compelling assessment of the collective psycholog…
November 20, 2018Photo by jplenio / Pixabay“Acknowledging my illness,” writes Melyssa A. Harmon in Flecks of Red (Nautical Life Press, 2018), “allows me to take emotional ownership of all that comes with it w…
September 18, 2018Background photo by tsauquet / PixabayGenre is the most significant category in which books trade on the literary marketplace. Nonfiction or fiction. Memoir or novel. Literary fiction or romance, horr…
September 11, 2018Photo: Jarle VinesNorway is a country that shows up on the stage of Weltliteratur quite regularly. Henrik Ibsen had to live for more than two decades abroad to find the Archimedean point nece…
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Edited by John Zheng, Conversations with Lenard D. Moore (University Press of Mississippi, 2024) collects sixteen interviews conducted over…
Shalama and Paul, Shanghai, 1950. Photo courtesy of Jean Hoffmann Lewanda
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