Guest Editor Carmen Boullosa
What is it like to grow up in a country where the only safe place you can gather with friends is in your own home? How do you raise a family when going to the supermarket is fraught with the danger of being kidnapped? This is the situation in Mexico, where the drug wars have transformed the country into a living hell. Guest editor Carmen Boullosa has assembled compelling essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry from Mexican writers on the impact of this bloody conflict. In their eyewitness reports, Luis Felipe Fabre, Rafael Perez Gay, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Lemus, Fabrizio Mejia Madrid, Hector de Mauleon, Magali Tercero, Jorge Volpi, and Juan Villoro document the crisis and demand the world's attention.
From the other side of the world, we present poetry commemorating last year's Japanese earthquake, and launch a new serial about an unexpected pig.
Fiction Serial
Japan One Year Later
Book Reviews
Friedrich Christian Delius’s “Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman”
Christian Delius confirms his facility with experimental form and skillfully creates a varied and textured experience for the reader
César Aira’s “Varamo”
What is it that we do, really, when we write? And why can’t a fish be embalmed to look like it’s playing a tiny piano?
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Letter Killers Club”
To the members of the Letter Killers Club, letters of the alphabet are the prison cells of concepts, and they need to be destroyed.
Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm
The authorities insist they are taking / appropriate steps / to control the plague of zombies
Tijuana: On the Pozole-Man’s Hill
He was like a butcher who says, "I don’t kill the cattle, I simply cut them up."
The History of the Present: Sergio González Rodríguez on the Mexican Literary World and the Drug War
The Mexican literary world is in crisis as it tries to face the history of the present.
Notes on the Violence in Sinaloa, Mexico
"Here, the killers protect us: they’re good people, they’re my friends."
