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Like a clutch of words strewn over white paper. Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. Turning to look behind me, I saw the snow already sifting [...]

A CT scan leads to a surprising discovery in this short fiction from Australia. C lara's first (and last) acting role was that of Medusa, the Greek monster. She was [...]

In these chronicles of funeral workers in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, families gather in a cemetery the size of fifty soccer fields to try to achieve more or less [...]

I had coffee with one of Nebraska's bookbinders a few months ago. A meeting I remember with gratitude. A gifted workman, Kevin started his career in traditional literature but later [...]

Deciding between his mother's sweet love and his father.' conditional approval, Kimurguk endures a harrowing rite of passage to transform from boy to man. I must have been fourteen when [...]

What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? From Gone with the Wind to detective novels, Immanuel Kim [...]

In this excerpt from a classic Argentine horror novel, something sinister visits a bathing woman in her new apartment. 'T he high heels! The high heels!' When the doorbell rang, [...]

Trigger warning for suicide and graphic violence. Desperate to have a child, a couple takes an unorthodox route to conception. But did they bargain with the devil? T he door [...]

Following the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to revisit Amit Chaudhuri's On Being Indian, set […]

Born in London in 1997, Andrej Al-Asadi is among the foremost young poets writing in Macedonian today. In a conversation with Peter Constantine, he discusses his multicultural background and the [...]

From the missing work of Sappho to Lucy Ellmanns thousand-page, stream-of-consciousness novel Ducks, Newburyport, our columnist considers the linguistic, cultural, and human challenges to translation. L ately, I've been considering [...]

Zuckerman, Jeffrey As the juror who nominated Devi for the Neustadt Prize, Fabienne Kanor made a passionate case for her work when the jury convened on the University of Oklahoma [...]

Taking the measure of Cape Town's many contradictions, a visiting writer also discerns its manifold richness. O ne morning, twenty-four years ago on a rocky Robben Island beach, I foraged [...]

Our columnist looks at the smallest language on earth--both deliberately simple and full of ambiguity--and explores its recent development and existing translations. W e have a winner for the smallest [...]

GENE LUEN YANG (b. 1973) began making comics and graphic novels in the fifth grade. In 2006 his book American Born Chinese, published by First Second Books, became the first [...]

Taking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own. ********** A round 2008 I made the unlikely decision to take all 140-ish [...]

The exhibit Etel Adnan, Between East and West is ongoing at Ithra, a museum and cultural space in Saudi Arabia. This is the first retrospective exhibition in Saudi Arabia showcasing [...]

Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in a world that [...]

'Ruins give us this beautiful idea,' writes the author, 'that you could make something, something wonderful and strange, as pleasing as you could, imbuing it with something of yourself' Yet [...]

Four artists of Iraqi descent are achieving global recognition for their paintings and handbag design. Both proud of their culture of origin and open to resources beyond national designations, these [...]

DAVID EDMONDS Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2023. 408 pages. THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century was a difficult [...]

Writer, artist, and photographer Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. The author of fourteen poetry collections and twenty-four novels, [...]

For Shizue Ogawa, creating is more important than publishing and selling, and yet her readership has been steadily growing in Japan and internationally. Her poetry paints the world with serenity [...]

With the introduction of new platforms for reading and engaging with the printed word in recent decades, book lovers might be forced to wonder: Is this a book? The authors [...]

Serge Chamchinov is a man of many languages and a scientist, visual artist, writer, and book binder. He creates first, then self-promotes his books through book reviews, exhibitions, and poetry [...]

'Books,' writes Robert Bringhurst, 'are things that humans make, or try to make, as persistently as birds make nests, and we do it for similar reasons.' In the following essay, [...]

responding to Kati Horna's photographic series Ode to Necrophilia And then the time came to be inside this island a room he carved out of (the mask grinned, the mask [...]

DEREK CHUNG A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist Trans. May Huang. Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2023. 112 pages. DEREK CHUNG'S A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist [...]

Award-winning Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop (b. 1946) is one of todays most prominent Afri can novelists, playwrights, and essayists. As the winner of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for [...]

BOBBY AZARIAN The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity Dallas. BenBella Books. 2022. 320 pages. A GOOD AMOUNT of caution is [...]

The following interview with Ada Limón took place shortly after her appointment, in July 2022, as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Although I [...]

A young woman with two degrees and no job hits the streets of Palermo looking for work with only a Dorothy Parker poem to sustain her. Ratty slippers, disheveled hair, [...]

A blinding light filled the sanctuary as the two vials, once empty, filled with chrism and oil of the catechumens. Candles dimmed in the wake of the sharp white light. [...]

AMELIA WALKER Alogopoiesis Sydney. Life Before Man Press. 2023.340 pages. IN A LONG BOOK that altogether forgoes page numbers, early on readers encounter a set of lines conjuring a mouth [...]

Take a whirling tour of Buenos Aires's secondhand bookstores and meet an array of eccentric reader types with porteño writer Matías Serra Bradford. A cinema transformed into a bookstore. The [...]

A cliché about Oklahoma City and Oklahoma in the national imagination is that it is a place to be passed through. In stories of the Dust Bowl, Oklahoma is a [...]

For the first two months of war, I can't locate my uncle in Odesa. Uncle Valerii, who is over eighty, and usually very active on social media, is nowhere to [...]

Al Panteliat is a poet from Kharkiv--he and I have been in touch for over a decade, exchanging notes, translating poems. Now, one word that appears often in his writing [...]

I first came across Masa Kolanovic's illustrated novel, Slobostina Barbie (Underground Barbie), written in Croatian and published by VBZ in 2008, as I completed my dissertation in comparative literature. I [...]

Where have books been? Where are they going? In this tour d'horizon Alice-Catherine Carls finds common goals among keepers of books even as the many forms of the book expand. [...]

SETTING A SUCCULENT into the window box outside, Maria spotted the boys from 2D in the courtyard below. Three brick buildings and a wire fence framed the yard. Up above, [...]

This essay takes the form of a jazz standard. Nestled within the intro and outro are alternating A and B sections. I am sustained by John Coltrane's music and the [...]

Yelena Lembersky (b. 1969) grew up in Leningrad at a time when Jews were starting to leave for Israel or the United States--if they could get out. Soviet Jews had [...]

1. I love that ellipses begin with an ancient Greek word meaning 'to leave out.' I admire this wistful, self-quieting punctuation mark composed of three dots, separated by three spaces, [...]

Written in the early stages of the pandemic, this fairytale-like story finds a man looking to shape his environment to reflect the fragility of life--one screw at a time. An [...]

ANDREY KURKOV The Silver Bone: A Novel Trans. Boris Dralyuk. New York. HarperVia. 2024. 304 pages. THE SUFFERINGS of the Ukrainian people are not just a matter for our evening [...]

Phillip Lopate A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays New York. New York Review Books. 2023.216 pages. IT WOULD BE EASY to jump to the wrong conclusion about [...]

Johan Rockstrõm & Owen Gaffney Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet London. DK. 2021. 227 pages. WHY SHOULD JUST this book on climate change science and preemptive policies merit [...]

In this fraught meeting between father and daughter, a woman rescues what she can from an estranged relationship. two weeks ago, when i saw my father, i wrote, 'dear diary, [...]