175 Nonfiction entries in Mag: Articles
From “Pol Pot’s Smile”
1 The road through the landscape. You have to drive well below the speed limit of 70 kmh unless you already know the wheeltracks, the potholes, the curves. Roads in Cambodia aren't much different.…...
Dear Torturer
Evil wears no gloves. You turned red with shame when the slice of cake tipped over onto the tablecloth. Because you've known for a long time what is appropriate in a German cafe. The waiter hissed:…...
From “Towers of Stone”
I made a habit of visiting the refugees in the train standing in the middle of nowhere, outside the village of Karabulak. From far away you got the impression that the train had stopped because of some…...
Rwanda: The Flame of Hope
1 The sunny side of life Recently one evening, as trails of ochre tinged with mauve kept stretching late into the sky of Mantua, I found myself face to face with Predrag Matvejević, the writer from…...
When Chaos Came to Salzburg
Pentecost, the peaceful holiday, had come, and Salzburg was something akin to a city under a state of emergency. By Friday, even schoolgirls from good homes did not make it all the way to school, if they…...
A Revolutionary Tradition: Shoars in Iranian Street Politics
As images of the bloody crackdown by government militias and plainclothes policemen on the peaceful demonstrations were broadcast after the controversial results of the tenth presidential elections in…...
An Interview with Suzanne Jill Levine
María Constanza Guzmán: In the introduction to The Subversive Scribe, you mention the usefulness of "self-referential inquisitions by prose translators" as models for the study of translation…...
Milano Inside a Star
Monte Stella—Mount Star—is an artificial hill right on the northern outskirts of Milano, not far from the Meazza Soccer Stadium, located in the San Siro quarters of town. Mount Star was built…...
Memory of a Paris Street
It's been almost three years since I ended up on that street in the Grenelle quarter. Chance led me there—or rather, not so much chance as intoxication. The intoxication of the streets that always…...
A Journey to Spitsbergen
I On the flight from Oslo to Tromsø, two worlds: the land far below me, the map on my lap. Outside, the sun is setting. The clouds hanging over the land on my map have been painted by Max Ernst,…...
From “Iberia”
There are those who think that Mundaca is the most beautiful town on the Biscayan coast. In mid-autumn, on stormy days, the wind has stripped the trees naked. Summer homes seemed abandoned, but the charm…...
1808
How a mad queen, a fearful prince, and a corrupt court deceived Napoleon and changed the history of Portugal and Brazil forever At the end of the summer of 1808, exactly 200 years ago, an unusual event…...
Seismic Activity
I am one of those writers who like to incorporate the short story in the novel. I did so in some novels, playing with forms. But to place the novel in the short story is another story, virtually impossible.…...
from “Dreaming of Baghdad”
His life was short but rich, crammed with events. He was arrested at the age of seventeen, released five years later, and executed when he was twenty-four. At the foot of the mountains, the bushes burn…...
Introduction: The Tenses of Fidelity
The pieces collected here represent the many uses of memory in shaping and completing narratives. Some of these pieces are identified as memoirs and presented as truth; others blur the borders between…...
The Silence of Abraham Bomba
Images of a hair salon. Opposing mirrors multiply these images, the chairs, the men waiting in back, the barbers busy, on their feet, great white aprons knotted around their customers' necks. Over…...
Brooklyn Trilogy
For Paul & Enrique 1 In the early eighties, during his first trip to New York, the writer Enrique Vila-Matas waited at a bus stop on Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum. He thought he would…...
Introduction
Yesterday afternoon in a Lahore hospital I met a young policeman who could neither talk to me nor see me. He was lying patiently on a bed in Gangaram Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. He had just shown…...
The First Morning
I have no definite answer to questions about why I migrated from India to Pakistan after the partition in 1947. I look back and see a crowded train rushing past lively and desolate towns and villages,…...
Pink Pigeons—Was It They Who Won?
An early August wind whispers through the lush green trees of Alma Ata. The tiny leaves break into applause. "What are these trees called?" I ask the interpreter. "Tuzhi," the ravishing, delicate Tatar…...
