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COVID-19

Black and white image of Berlin's Potzdamer Platz in the 1930s.

Sludge G, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Toward a Vision of Post-COVID Urban Space: Joseph Roth’s City of Miniatures

By Alexander Wells

Reading Roth’s Berlin miniatures, a sense of the dynamic between sociability and justice feels essential to the urban experience.

A Message to Our Friends on the Moon: The Pandemic of 2020

By Milton Hatoum

The wars never ceased, the surveillance and control wrought by our digital world eroded our liberties, unemployment and poverty grew.

Translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker

Pas de Deux

By Libuše Moníková

Being with you is like being on an island, a quarantine island.

Translated from German by Anne Posten

COVID-19

By Arlinda Guma

In Germany the statue of Marx is playing chess with the family doctor

Translated from Albanian by Peter Constantine

A Persian New Year Beginning with COVID-19

By Poupeh Missaghi

With the news coming out of Iran, I was already beginning to feel the weight of the ongoing disaster in my body.

Really Real Dragons

By Laia Jufresa

When I go out with my daughter, I herd her along, trying to keep her two meters away from anyone who approaches.

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

On Masks

take custody of my mouth

Translated from Chinese by Shuyu Guo

notes from this city

By Carolina Pihelgas

the window frames have become national borders, the doorknob a border guard.

Translated from Estonian by Adam Cullen

Multilingual

Pandemic Diary

By Ricardo Romero

We are bad actors who suddenly find themselves in a leading role.

Translated from Spanish by Charlotte Coombe

What We Lost: COVID-19 Beyond the Numbers

By Hideo Furukawa & Kathleen McCaul Moura

What has the coronavirus taken from us? We need to answer this in a way that isn’t expressed through numbers.

Translated from Japanese by David Boyd

Spring Cleaning

By Yishai Sarid

I’ve been married almost twenty-five years, and I’ve never gotten carried away on an adventure like this before.

Translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan

Wuhan Lockdown Diary

It was not my plan to start writing a diary, let alone keep doing it for seventy-seven days.

Translated from Chinese by Hongwei Bao

6:00 p.m. after the Quarantine

By Lilya Kalaus

“The world will remain untouchable and unknowable, whether you’re in its corona or not.”

Translated from Russian by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

From the Red Desert

I write to you from the red zone.

Translated from Italian by Danielle Pieratti

Multilingual

A Thundering Silence

By Felipe Restrepo Pombo

She stared at me in horror before hurrying off as fast as she could.

Translated from Spanish by Ezra E. Fitz

A boy wearing a headlamp lies on his stomach on a bunk bed and reads a comic book in the dark

Photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash

Corona Is a Ball with Spikes

It’s everybody versus corona.

Translated from Norwegian by Guy Puzey

Iovana, or The Birth of the Hero

By Iana Boukova

“And it was there, in the half-dark kitchen of the priest’s house, while finishing his second bowl of soup, that Damyan suddenly realized something was wrong.”

Translated from Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova

Plague Diary, March 23, 2020

By Gonçalo M. Tavares

“They say that even the smallest particles, like the virus, atoms, etc., make a sound . . .

Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

Morning Conversation

By Milena Solot

Although I wasn't really worried. I mean not really worried about him; you know what I mean?

Living in a Sci-Fi Movie: An Italian Screenwriter on Coronavirus

By Silvia Ranfagni

I’m living in a sci-fi movie. In fact, you are too. It’s a strange movie and the popcorn tastes of hand sanitizer.