Latest
December 18, 2024
Solar Flare | Fiction
Miriam Gordis
When Alex came back from the dead, it was the summer of all the heat waves. Every time it got above 95 degrees, an alert on our phones told us to turn off the lights and keep our refrigerators closed. Something was wrong with the grid and they couldn’t or wouldn’t fix it. Sometimes they came down my block and tinkered and then left. There were blackouts for hours at...
December 18, 2024
Abolish the Categories
Yasmin Zaher
I must begin with my own condition. I’m a Palestinian writer and a citizen of Israel, my mother tongue is Arabic, I write in English, and I live in France. My novel does not fit in the category of Arab literature, because it is not written in Arabic; nor can it be American or English literature, because I am not American or British. Classifying it as French literature would be...
December 18, 2024
A Natural Passenger | Poetry
Homa Zarghamee
as natural as a pigeon in asphalt and the dove that mourns above it so natural that when the wing breaks and the body buckles or the car bends around the tree like a knotweed or the conductor is momentarily blinded so that the train derails and turns on its side like a restless sleeper I will return to my seat
December 18, 2024
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Angelo Hernandez Sias, Carey Baraka, Marta Figlerowicz, Michael Barron, Na Zhong, Siddhartha Deb, Yasmin Zaher, Zain Khalid
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
December 18, 2024
Everything We Need
Zain Khalid
Since Elias Khoury, the celebrated Lebanese novelist and critic, died in September, I have been thinking about a passage from his 1998 epic of Palestinian displacement, Gate of the Sun. “You should have eaten the oranges,” Khoury’s narrator is told by a former freedom fighter. “The homeland is something we have to consume,” the freedom fighter continues. “We have to devour the oranges of Palestine, and we have to devour...
December 18, 2024
And One Day the Work Dies
Angelo Hernandez Sias
A man dies while out clubbing, then watches as his body is brought to the home of a famous fashion designer, who fondles it. This is the plot of “The Return,” a late story by Roberto Bolaño. It is also the plot of Bolaño’s authorial afterlife. In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many...
December 18, 2024
The Empire Marches On
Siddhartha Deb
In 1913, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in literature on the basis of Gitanjali, a single volume of poems idiosyncratically self-translated from Bengali into English. “A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination,” W.B. Yeats wrote in his introduction. A British colonial subject, Tagore was an inhabitant of that thing we call the world, which...
December 16, 2024
In Ruins | Archaeological Warfare in the West Bank
Jasper Nathaniel
On the quiet afternoon of March 5, 2024 in the northern occupied West Bank, I watched as a convoy of Israeli military jeeps drove along a narrow, winding road lined with terraced olive groves, passing the remnants of at least ten major civilizations dating back to the Bronze Age, to the summit of the tallest hill in Sebastia, a Palestinian village of about four thousand people. Near the hilltop archaeological...
December 11, 2024
On the Grid | How Surveillance Became a Love Language
Zoë Hitzig
A full-page ad in a November 1990 issue of Fortune magazine features two dozen men in dark suits turned away from the viewer. Standing in neat rows, most blend together in a uniform mass. But three are singled out, with red targets pinned to their backs. The text below the shadowy tableau reads: “Wouldn’t it be great if new customers were this easy to spot? Now they can be.” Bullseye....
