From figuring out how much pizza her royalties would purchase to leading a poetry publishing project in Colombia—Cardumen Libros—Alejandra Algorta has always been a supporter of the things that are urgent, that are important.
In Vi Khi Nao's Fish in Exile, Ethos and Catholic are grief-stricken at the deaths of their infant children. It is Catholic, however, whose body undergoes substantive change and becomes directly conflated with trauma and death.
In Crazy Rich Asians (2013), Kevin Kwan offers us a window into a world of wealth capable of altering the very ontological condition of the characters who enjoy it. Reading Kwan’s novel, I’m reminded of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722).
Jay-Z’s latest album 4.44 rejects racial transcendence, while promoting Black business ingenuity. Although Jay-Z acknowledges America’s capitalistic history of enslavement and the tragic stories associated with Black celebrity, he promotes Black ownership as the dominant means for authentic financial freedom in America.
Learning from artists, how to write, to draw, to see, taught me of bounty. Their insistence, their calling, always, attention to the smallest things, taught me the most precious kind of survival: the abiding joy and knowledge that there is always something.
In The Solar Grid, the people on earth are screwed. A global ecological disaster. A corporate-sponsored attempt to “fix” it, and our willingness to assign the label of “third world” to a place so we can ignore it.
Dr. Aron Aji is a highly accomplished translator with a range of work under his belt, from Turkish writers that include Elif Shafak, Murathan Mungan, Bilge Karasu, and Latife Tekin. We chatted about his background, how Bilge Karasu subverts the stereotypical Turkish identity, and the internalization of exile.
The first word or two of a poem is such a small thing, one word out of many, but in a poem every single word can hold the weight of the entire piece.
Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman, translated by Christina MacSweeney, interrogates the psyche of characters mired by the Spanish economic crisis and the realities and lies they build around themselves in search of catharsis.
Perhaps the core difficulty in discovering truth exists in lieu of our inability to trust.