139 Nonfiction entries in Mag: Articles
Correspondences in the Air: On The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry
Octavio Paz once wrote that the modern poet “extracts his visions from within himself.” It is my hope that our comprehensive, aesthetically varied anthology of poetry from ...
The Languages of Alta Ifland
Alta Ifland’s writing raises important questions about the legitimacy and practice of autobiography that are too often taken for granted by American writers. In an alert literary age, ...
Animal Farm; or, a Short and Somewhat Political History of Comics in Poland
The Goat Polish comics began in 1919 with the publication in the Lvov satirical weekly Szczutek (“Fillip”) of With Fire and Sword; or, The Adventures of Mad GrzeĊ, about a young ...
Balloon to Solaris
Polish speculative fiction has been developing for over two hundred years, although it was only sixty years ago that science fiction began to be treated as a separate segment of the publishing ...
Three Times Germany
Three Times Germany is an audio production of twenty-three monologues performed by eight actors. The monologues are based on interviews of East Germans, West Germans, and Germans living in New ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
