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Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…
Martyn Crucefix’s recent publications are Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019) and The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). These Numbered Days, translations of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020. A Rilke Selected will be published by Pushkin Press in 2023. A translation of essays by Lutz Seiler, Sundays I…
How to Turn into a Bird María José Ferrada Tin House | December 6, 2022 Ramón, the protagonist in How to Turn into a Bird, is not like the others. He left his job working long hours at the factory. He no longer lives within the thin walls of his apartment complex with his young…
When voicedness in art is tied to vulnerability in life, exposure—and not evasion, denial, and declarative muteness—ensures survival.
Studies with children have directly connected reading fiction with the development of empathy, but things get messy when we look at how empathy actually works in the real world. Who are we empathizing with, and who are we leaving out? And will it really lead to moral action, or is it just a sentimental entertainment?
Culture shock is central to Tawada Yôko’s subject matter: her characters tend to be travelers of one kind or another—mail-order brides, bewildered exchange students—forced to wander in the gap between languages, where the meaning of ordinary daily experience turns slippery and weird.
Robert Pinsky’s narrative moves insofar as it leads to poetry: that the events of a life in writing seem a bit accidental; that what sustains a life in writing is not fame, not a cartoon version of oneself chatting with Lisa Simpson, but a commitment to language bordering obsession.
Few witches in literary history have been as influential—or as maligned—as Morgan le Fay. To understand Morgan le Fay is thus to understand something of the nature of witches’ and witchcraft’s literary representation as a whole.
The newest book by Hiroko Oyamada, published in English translation by David Boyd earlier this month, teems with tropical fish and its eponymous weasels, whose lives and deaths reveal the precariousness of parenthood and family.
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