Author Archive
Underemployment and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier
Although employment has been on the rise for several years, jobs that are available are often low wage or part time. And people still are losing work altogether: factory worker unemployment has been an issue for decades—especially in the Great Lakes region.
When Change Doesn’t Happen: School Shootings and the Piles of Novels That Follow
Since the year after the Columbine tragedy, 2000, a total of 113 novels have been published in English about school shootings. The number of novels published on school shootings before Columbine? One.
Should Creative Writers Adopt the Same Objectivity Expected of Journalists and Historians?
In this particular moment, journalists have come under fire for their presentation or concoctions of the “truth” with a capital T. They’re expected to write as objectively as possible, but writers, especially those who write historical fiction, have been known to bend facts in service of story and are
Vietnam and the Loss of Innocence
The Vietnam War has long been recognized as a turning point in the United States as a country, in which Americans lost their “innocence” with regards to politics and war.
The Burden of Witness: The Sandcastle Girls, #MeToo, and The Armenian Genocide
On April 24, 2015 I was in Istanbul when the hundred-year commemorations of the start of the Armenian Genocide were taking place. A group of Armenians, Turks, and foreigners ended a walk to remember the massacre.
Readerships Without Borders: An Interview with Michael Reynolds, Editor-in-Chief of Europa Editions
I chatted with Michael Reynolds about his Bookselling Without Borders program, Europa Editions’ unique mission in the field of translation publishing, and how Reynolds’ life and time abroad informs his sensibilities as an editor.
“There’s Value in Translating All Kinds of Things”: An Interview with Dr. Karen Emmerich
Anglophone readers owe a debt to translator and professor Dr. Karen Emmerich for her many contributions to Greek literature in translation. Currently a professor of Comparative Litearture at Princeton University, Emmerich has translated everyone from Yiannis Ritsos to Margarita Karapanou to Christos Ikonomou.
What is a Foreigner?
There are few more cutting words in a language you don’t speak fluently than the word foreigner. In Greek the word, xenos, bites into your skin, pins you down into the character of the other, even though at its simplest form it means to not be of the place.
Who Gets Translated? George Seferis and the Luck of Translation
My first encounter with Seferis was through a bilingual edition of his work translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Until I read Seferis’s work, I hadn’t known Greek could be so beautiful, moving, and meaningful, even though I didn’t understand all of it at the time.
A City of One’s Own
These days living and working as a writer in Istanbul requires a bravery that most American writers have never imagined they would have to muster, a bravery far beyond what it already takes to put pen to paper.