Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is, by both artistic and political measures, one of the most important writers of the last fifty years. A novelist, playwright, and essayist, he is often cited as the first East African writer to be published in English, but the most revolutionary aspect of his vast body of work was his turn, […]
Scuttling and Creeping Photo by Image Catalog Through the dark one-way mirror, I watched a group of toddlers shoving squishy foam cars along a rug, their faces grim with concentration. Another group was piled in and around the lap of a sturdy woman reading a picture book. And in back, on a wooden loft, a […]
Hur’s new novel offers a suspenseful search for family secrets, populated with ghosts and Korean folk stories.
Not being able to go home again resembles the nature of trauma: it can be located, but it cannot be solved.
When Henry enters a Walmart to steal medicine for his sick child, he glances up to see an American flag dangling from its side, “turning its stripes into prison cell bars.” With thirty-eight cents in his pocket, he struggles to focus on his mission while being enticed and overwhelmed by the abundance of goods on […]
Nors achieves exquisite interiority in these narratives, burrowing so precisely into a character’s memory and revealing its ever-present nature in the mind.
Missaghi’s book maps the city and its dead, maps the way women move and act in public and private spaces in the city, maps history and overlaps it with a present.
The seventy-one pieces in this dexterous, surprising collection are often weird and unexpectedly weighty, particularly for such trim stories, like Lydia Davis by way of David Lynch.
As we share the same codified language predilections, we share the same thoughts and perceptions. The Queen’s English is the enemy of the nonnormative.
The approach feels organic, echoing the experience of families receiving letters from Vietnam “in lots of three or more.” The missives are read “straight through and out of order.”