Photo courtesy of the American Writers Museum
The new American Writers Museum, opening this May in Chicago, celebrates American literature in a lively, interactive space that honors America’s writers…
In Every Issue
There are three recent books from the University of Oklahoma Press that I know would make great summer reading. My own Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity…
As much as Managing Editor Michelle Johnson loves traveling, she also loves returning home. Her summer reading list reflects a similar course this year. Eli…
This summer Web Editor Jen Rickard Blair is planning to read a balance of books that refuel calm and creativity as well as examine human nature and our shared hi…
Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire. Anne Carson Float Random House I fo…
Photo: Beau Rogers The indignities and brutalities suffered by ethnic and racial groups at the hands of others are legion on the unhappiest pages of human history. Not the least of these insults is,…
With a wealth of fiction, nonfiction, and verse stacking up in his office, Book Review Editor Rob Vollmar has narrowed his reading ambitions for the summer down to these three worthy titles.…
Rahim AlHaj Letters from Iraq: Oud and String Quintet Smithsonian Folkways Iraqi-born composer Rahim AlHaj’s latest album, Letters from Iraq, is his most ambitious to date. AlHaj…
Photo: Annabelle Shemer The creative collaboration between myself and Israeli poet Gili Haimovich began around 2009. The first poem of hers to be published in English translation was “Evolution,” wit…
Photo: Bequest/Pixabay By a lake, on a train, deep in a canyon, or at home on your back porch: it’s time to catch up on the outstanding global writing publishers have been bringing out since January.…
Stratford Theatre. Photo by Richard Bain For half the year, the hamlet of Stratford, Ontario—named after the birthplace of William Shakespeare—is much like any other small North American town. But in…
Washington, DC, is a city that holds culture and the arts close to its heart. When the stereotypes and outside-the-beltway misconceptions about what this city is—political infighting, opportunistic s…
Kim Stafford The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems Little Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the ge…
Image: NEYRO2008/123rf stock photo In his address to the International Association of Crime Writers 2013 meeting in Oxford, Christopher MacLehose commented that publishers like him are always looking…
OY Space Diaspora Crammed Discs This issue’s special section on climate dystopias set me wondering what kind of responses to an uncertain future dwell in the world music community. One…
Illustration: Verso Books Despite the popular culture trope that the golden age of activism (the 1950s and ’60s) is over, despite the endless distractions offered by digital entertainment, and despit…
A still from the film Ten Years (2015). When Hong Kong was returned to communist China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” principle, no one really knew for sure what would happen t…
Skeppsholmen Island in central Stockholm, home of Moderna Museet where the Stockholm Literature festival takes place. Photo: Routes North/www.routesnorth.com As literary events go, Stockholm Literatu…
Alina Bronsky Baba Dunja’s Last Love Trans. Tim Mohr Europa Editions Alina Bronsky is skillful at inventing darkly humorous protagonists, and Baba Dunja is no exception. This short novel is a surp…
Rowan Atkinson as Maigret in the ITV feature-length adaptation of Maigret Sets a Trap. Early last year, fans of the actor Rowan Atkinson were surprised, and many astonished, by the British n…
Beats Antique Shadowbox Antique American composer Henry Cowell traveled to a variety of countries in the 1950s on behalf of the State Department, building bridges between cultures conside…
Migrants heading north through Mexico on La Bestia (“The Beast”). Nadia Villafuerte’s collection of short stories Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston) portrays a wide variety of voices inhab…
With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million peo…
Photos © David Joshua Jennings Literature inhabits the antiquated, potholed avenues of New Orleans like a dense and permanent fog. Stories sweat down from the French Quarter’s trellised terraces, haun…
Photos by Laura Hernandez. Celebrating its eleventh year, the Brooklyn Book Festival hosts writers from around the world and highlights the literary landscape in a two-day book extravaganza. The festi…