Photos by Ellie Simon
Japanese fiction offers no shortage of cats. From Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat at the turn of the twentieth century—in which a sardonic feline reflects on the…
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Contemporary literature by authors from Madagascar is as multifaceted as the many faces and voices writing it. There are some shared characteristics, of course. It is insular, because it comes from an… -
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” What was this quote, from Somerset Maugham, doing written on a scrap of paper shoved into a… -
“Literature tends to draw sustenance from itself, of course, and thus to frame to an unusual degree the continuities and recurrences of the structures related to exile. Broad though the spectrum of th… -
Monnet Hall, named after OU Law School dean Julien Charles Monnet (1868–1951), was built in 1913 / Illustration by OU alumnus Charles Ward (1924–2020) Over a century ago, following World Wa… -
“Hopepunk” as a subgenre was born on Tumblr in 2017. There, fantasy author Alexandra Rowland gave her readers a simple yet powerful directive: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. P… -
Daniel Simon’s anthology for the magazine’s centennial, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature, is forthcoming from Restless Books in February 2026. The following n… -
Photo by Laura Sheahen “We’ve treated Pushkin rather well here. We haven’t torn down his statue,” remarks a teenage boy outside the Markučiai Manor Museum in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuan… -
A Renaissance illustration from Dante's Inferno by Sandro Botticelli / Wikicommons What happens when you talk with an AI chatbot about translations of a classic? Our columnist… -
Amid the noise and uncertainty of our time, healing fiction can grant readers a moment of stillness. These stories show that meaning can be found in everyday adversity, that alternatives always exist,… -
“Who on earth asks you to go on editing a literary magazine? The answer, of course, is nobody. This sort of business is as a rule considered a gratuitous activity, as unimportant as throwing yourself… -
Like Little Women on an ayahuasca trip, Tehrangeles is delightfully twisted and heartfelt. If you set a TikTok mukbang at a Crazy Rich Persian wedding, you’d still have a long way to… -
An epistolary symposium devoted to “The World’s Worst Book” appeared in the Winter 1941 issue. The following Proustian riposte, or “riproust,” came from Channing Pollock.… -
“Because I teach literature at the university level,” remarks Pierre Bayard as he launches the argument in his most recent book, superbly translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, “there is, in… -
Our columnist reviews a range of translations of the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, looking at how book cover design can change from language to language.One of the fasci… -
As a book review editor, I would describe my relationship with writing designed to sell books as something of a bombardment. I have great respect for publicists and the work they do, but doing what I… -
Photo by Alessandro / Stock.adobe.com Emil Lucka on Critics: A Little Lower Than the Angels“Up to this point we have not dealt with the absolute quality of the work under consideration. In… -
Photo 1 by Mahmoud Muna / All other photos by Yousef KhanfarI judge a city not by its skyscrapers, highways, or monuments but by the quiet hum of its people, the soul of its art, and the sweet scent o… -
Photo by Feodor Chistyakov / Unsplash.com The image of the translator is often that of the lonely, intrepid soul working endless hours, accompanied only by stacks of books, but our colu… -
hoto of Oaxacan parade by victorfotomx / Stock.adobe.com Our guide, Ayumi, is wrapping up a three-hour walking tour of the Mexican city of Oaxaca when she grins and says, “And my final advi… -
Photo of Liberty Books at Peregrine Farmstall Tiny bookstores are thriving across South Africa. J. L. Powers offers a guided tour of some of her favorites.As the Atlantic Ocea… -
The “Open Book” of Odysseus ElytisElytis served on the 1972 Neustadt Prize jury, which chose Gabriel García Márquez for the award. His nominee was the French writer Claude Simon.… -
Xalapa is the capital of the eastern state of Veracruz and home to one of the richest treasures of Mexico’s Gulf Coast Mesoamerican heritage: the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa. Opened in 1986, the M… -
Illustration by ilbusca / iStock.com Veronica Esposito looks at the strangely fascinating imagery authors have used to describe self-translation and the battle between two languages, fr… -
The Alley of Writers. Photo by Farhodjon Chinberdiev / Unsplash.com You see a lot from a train window, and after a few days of railing through Uzbekistan, I detected a nationwide fondness f…