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In Safia Elhillo’s 2017 poetry collection, both the historical figure of Abdelhalim Hafez and his personification seem to serve as an umbilical cord connecting the speaker to her heritage as she navigates the trauma of immigration.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel beautifully showcases the way we experience life: the moments that are most important—the turning points—are often only realized in retrospect.
After we’d discussed the woeful state of my finances, the Sphinx asked me about the woeful state of my plans for my chapter talk. We were conversing during a meeting of the chapter. Not during the meeting itself, which takes place inside the Community Center, but just outside the entranceway where, during breaks, the chapter…
Mother has been brewing phở with her own private stash of Saigon cinnamon for over twenty-four hours in anticipation of the lunch. The entire house is fragrant with its sweet spicy scent. Purchased on her last trip to Vietnam, the cinnamon, harvested near her childhood home in the Central Highlands, makes an appearance only on…
Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (2022), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books, and her poetry and translations have been featured in Ecotone, the Georgia Review, Hyphen, Two Lines, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and works at Graywolf Press.
Las Vegas is a feat of tremendous sleight of hand. What Diofebi shows in his debut novel, out this week, is all the thousands of machinations happening in the background, producing what is ultimately a glorious illusion.
Almontaser’s collection espouses neither sentimental nostalgia nor doomed isolation . . . these poems are poignant and melancholic, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, and always filled with beauty.
I imagine there is something about my grandmother that would have resisted translation. The best way I know to understand her, the site where my retina and hers overlap, is in language.
Pai Hsien-Yung’s 1983 novel is a story of exile: the narrative centers itself on the transience of home, and the chaos of the birth-family, in order to argue that home does not come from location, but from aesthetics—from beauty.
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