207 entries in Mag: Articles
Introduction
Two days ago, I stood at the DMZ with one of the authors in this issue, Jang Jin-sung. We looked across toward North Korea together from a guardpost on the South Korean side. Only a barbed wire fence below…...
I Want to Call Her Mother Again
My mother’s last words to us as we stood in the middle of the empty potato field, her voice carrying above the razor-sharp wind that seemed to carve away at our flesh, still ring in my ears. “You’re…...
The Poet Who Asked for Forgiveness
At its essence, the purpose of North Korean literature is to praise the Korean Workers’ Party. While South Korean poetry deals with topics such as love or life, North Korean poetry refers only to…...
The Arduous March
We stayed in the mountain village up until we left the North. Before that, when we had been living in the farming village, we couldn’t afford to visit our relatives in China. But after a few years…...
A Blackened Land
So many miracles have happened to me in the last few months. I left behind my beloved homeland where I was born and raised and made my way through hell, just under the nose of the grim reaper. Today, I…...
Beyond the Trauma of War: Iraqi Literature Today
A decade after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, we cannot approach Iraqi literature today without recognizing the multiple shifts and varieties in its expression. In a matter of ten years, the post-Ba'thist…...
The Last Six Days of Baghdad
This morning, I decide on another escape route to dodge the police surveillance of the rigid Mukhabarat we can’t seem to shake off. I will jump in the first illegal taxi that comes near the hotel…...
A Vacation in Basra
February 2005. Violence rages following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the southern port city of Basra is dominated by the militants of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The British, who are stationed…...
Bitter Lemons
Everything went well until we got to Corfu. It’s not that things started to go wrong there, but that this may have been an omen that our happiness had already been drawn out far too long. …...
A Note on Syrian Poetry Today
At a moment of simultaneous disintegration and creation, survival looms just where the danger is. What is it like to be Syrian today, when a long ending and an unknown beginning are bloodily mingled? What…...
On Uladzimir Niakliaeu
I recently read something that amused me: one poet was suggesting that we name a steamship after every one of his contemporaries. In his imagination, all his friends from the literary world took the shape…...
Oubapo: Comics and Constraints from France
Comics are a medium founded on constraints. Even more than prose, comics are subject to rules of sequence and format that to some degree determine the content of each work. Take the common newspaper…...
Time Stretches Out and My Words Do, Too
Mid-August. The beach, for the first time since the earthquake. The water is warm, just the way I like it. I keep saying that Haiti is neither a postcard nor a nightmare. This Sunday more than ever. I’m…...
January 12, 2010
An interview scheduled with the French writer and literary festival director Michel Le Bris and Dany Laferrière, a Haitian and Canadian novelist and journalist. The noise, first of all. As if some…...
Neverending Story: Haiti’s Vibrant Literary Sphere Endures
Almost three years ago in Haiti, Port-au-Prince and surrounding cities were nearly destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake. All aspects of Haitian life were greatly affected by the January 12, 2010, disaster.…...
Partners in Crime: Bitter Lemon Press
Bitter Lemon Press is dedicated almost exclusively to publishing foreign crime writing, set in exotic places, revealing the dark underbelly of distant countries and cities. We are very small, of course,…...
from “You Don’t Know: A Mafia Dictionary”
The following are selected from Andrea Camilleri’s Voi non sapete (You Don’t Know), a Mafia dictionary of sorts, largely based on the typed notes of “the boss of bosses,” Bernardo…...
Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga’s Korea, and Korean Literature
Marilyn Monroe came to South Korea in February of 1954. While honeymooning in Tokyo with Joe DiMaggio, she had boarded a military plane and was en route to Seoul even before the marriage was fully consummated.…...
Awakening the Individual Consciousness
This essay is part of “What Kind of China do We Want?,” a project of the Foreign Policy Initiative to inform the American public about the ideas and goals of China’s intellectuals, activists…...
This Country Must Break Apart
Exiled writer Liao Yiwu was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 14, 2012. In its citation, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association praised Liao Yiwu as "a Chinese author…...
