Selective Empathy Stories And The Power Of Narrative

Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change the world for the better.

Belief In An Age Of Intolerance

In this brief essay, poet and translator H. L. Hix argues that it is the act of believing, more than the thing believed, that relates more directly to intolerance.

The Faces Of Maigret

Early last year, fans of the actor Rowan Atkinson were surprised, and many astonished, by the British network ITV’s announcement it would be airing a feature length adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret tend un piège (Maigret Sets a Trap), with Atkinson in the lead role.

The American Nobel

Oklahoma’s Neustadt Prize

The Enduring Impermanence Of Jenny Erpenbeck

For Jenny Erpenbeck, nothing lasts forever, not home, not the rituals that connect us to previous generations, not even death. Even her writing style celebrates this impermanence.

Vectors, Vanishing Points, And Vicissitudes In The Works Of Jenny Erpenbeck

Life for Jenny Erpenbeck’s characters is a vector, a movement through time and space, in which both temporal and spatial circumstances impinge on the individual’s trajectory.

The Cadillac

A bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye.

Negotiating Four Generations Of Voices

(with a Little Help from Google Earth)

Crossed Paths

Wang Anyi traces Shanghai in map and memory as she revisits its lanes, a mental flâneur.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

The vendor booths line up in downtown Brooklyn, right in front of Brooklyn Borough Hall.

The History Of Grains

An intimate yet universal story of humanity breaking on your doorstep, “The History of Grains” depicts Greek islanders witnessing the mysterious arrival of abandoned vessels.

Translator's Note Unhomed

When asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around houses. Freud would say I protest too much. (I am merely grateful his list of impossible things—to govern, to teach, and to cure—does not include translation.)

Lit Lists 5 Favorite Literary Instas

While social media gives us an unprecedented connection to each other, the vast amount of constantly whirling information can be overwhelming.

Where Is A Bad Guy When You Really Need One?

Antagonists and Master Criminals

Dead Reckoning

The Darkening Landscape of Contemporary World Literature.

Writing as Judgment or Scream

A Conversation with Ash Erdogan.

#Moving

This story begins with three @ handles and ends with two. With a single hashtag, repeated insistently like a mantra: #moving. A flickering light on the computer screen in the dark. And a song.

Starving for Order

A Conversation with Ted Kooser.

Blind Spots - The 2018 Puterbaugh Keynote

After watching the dance adaptation of her story “Sand” at the 2018 Puterbaugh Festival, Erpenbeck delivered the following keynote, in which she invited the hundreds of attendees in the audience to reckon with their own blind spots—we must “step back in order to see,” she writes, “the entire historical tapestry extending far beyond [our] own lifetimes.”

Yu Xiuhua - A Life Lived In Poetry

She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speech and writing challenges, yet she has been the most talked-about and best-selling poet in China. Her name is Yu Xiuhua, and her life is a triumph of poetry.

Lin Shu, Author Of The Quixote

China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their innermost fantasies. He who speaks of China speaks of himself.– Simon Leys

De Beauvoir And Sartre On The Kibbutz

While visiting a kibbutz to give a lecture, and after dining on both hot desert-root vegetable soup and sushi, the speaker becomes the listener when someone in the audience completes an anecdote about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Slaying New Black Notions - Childish Gambino's 'This Is America'

Poet Ladan Osman considers how Childish Gambino obliterates rooted acts of black optimism and expression, leading us to understand the artist’s persona as a site upon which historical and aesthetic lineages are free to interact and contradict each other.

Cyber-Proletarian

“First and foremost, we focus on the comfort of our clients.” “And what aspects of your operations are oriented toward that goal?” “All of them.”

Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories

The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard.

The Most Important Way to Love and Peace Is Justice

A Conversation with Samar Yazbek.

Home

With Neil Young playing in the background, a New Zealand woman living in Australia recrosses the ocean over a game of Checkers.

Who Can Identify Byomkesh?

The Mystery of the Missing Indian Mysteries.

Swimming Through Bricks

A Conversation with Simon Armitage.

Zeroes

In this short essay, Slovene author Leonora Flis is both reduced to and saved by numbers while living as a foreigner in New York City.