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Politics

Portrait of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk
Photo copyright © Karpati&Zarewicz/ZAiKS
Ognosia
By Olga Tokarczuk
We will need new maps as well as the courage and humor of travelers who won’t hesitate to stick their heads outside the sphere of the world-up-to-this-point, beyond the horizon of existing dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
A Tactical Alliance
By Mamadou Kalidou Ba
Depleted as they were, they realized that they had to either team up or go under.
Translated from French by Ros Schwartz
On the Periphery
By Larissa Kyzer
The scope of the topics explored in this issue is, therefore, necessarily broad without being comprehensive.
At the Coffee Shop
By Rania Mamoun
This man must be high on something, I thought.
Translated from Arabic by Nesrin Amin
MultimediaMultilingual
Communism in Style
By Nadia Kamel
What I’m trying to say is that we didn’t have a sense of how dangerous it all was.
Translated from Arabic by Brady Ryan & Essayed Taha
Multilingual
Six Proposals for Participation in a Conversation about Bread
By Rasha Abbas
“That’s what we get for supporting Communism: standing in line for this black loaf.”
Translated from Arabic by Alice Guthrie
Behind Closed Doors: Outing the New Chilean Narrative
By Lina Meruane
Contrary to the epic, totalizing, and politically engaged narratives of the Latin American Boom, the scope of the stories here is narrow, intimate, more local than ever before.
Works Cited In Franciane Conceição Silva’s Panorama of Afro-Brazilian Literature
By Franciane Conceição Silva
References and Further Reading Alves, Miriam.Mulher Mat(r)iz. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2011.Alves, Miriam. Entrevista. Duke, Dawn (Org.). A escritora afro-brasileira: ativismo e arte literária.…
Translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Another Country: Afro-Brazilian Writing, Past and Present
By Eric M. B. Becker & John Keene
If the literature of a country with the second largest black population worldwide (only Nigeria has a larger black population) does not include that population in its literature, one must ask which Brazil we’re speaking of when we speak of Brazilian…
Insurgent Voices: A Panorama of Afro-Brazilian Writing
By Franciane Conceição Silva
Politicians know I’m a poet. And that poets face death when their people are oppressed.
Translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Multilingual
Black Teeth and Blue Hair
By Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Ignorance is a kind of blindness.”
Translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker
Afro-Brazilian Crusader: On Lima Barreto
By Felipe Botelho Correa
According to Barreto himself, the aim of his crusade was to produce a type of literature that he defined as “militante,” engaging with the society’s most pressing issues and communicating these issues to a wider audience in accessible language.
In Aflitos
By Jean Wyllys
She was furious! She grew silent again, went upstairs, and searched the nightstand. The pistol was there.
Translated from Portuguese by John Keene
Three Poems
By Ricardo Aleixo
A Black man is always somebody's Black man.
Translated from Portuguese by Dan Hanrahan
Multimedia
Four Poems
By Cristiane Sobral
Time, lord of the hours / reigns sovereign
Translated from Portuguese by John Keene
Multilingual
Reflections on the President’s Discourse
By Basma Abdel Aziz
This demonstrates how overwhelmingly crude his rhetoric is.
Translated from Egyptian Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
“It’s Us and Them”: Writing from and about Divided Countries
By Susan Harris
In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.
A Doctor from Homs
By Wendy Pearlman
Most massacres occurred after Friday prayers.
Crime in Ramallah: Noor’s Story
By Abbad Yahya
There were a lot of weapons being brandished, a lot of threats being shouted, and there was a lot of waiting around. The intifada uprising shifted from the streets onto the TV.
Translated from Arabic by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
MultimediaMultilingual
Losing Ground
By Zoran Janjanin
“It wasn’t a civil war. It was a rebellion.”
Translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
How Dorje Tsering Saved Tibetan
By Pema Bhum
Everyone knew that the way to become a revolutionary was through the Chinese language and not Tibetan.
Translated from Tibetan by Tenzin Dickie
from Abadaringi
By Jeroen Janssen
Those are things you mustn't ask questions about. Some people get sad.
Translated by Michele Hutchison
The Collapse of a Cellar
By Nawzat Shamdeen
“They shoot them right outside their front door and then send their folks a bill for the bullets.”
Translated from Arabic by Alice Guthrie
Fifteen Days
By Claudia Hernández
They'd take the girls to the hills for three or five days.
Translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches
The Angels Who Wiped My Fate Clean
By Kemal Varol
I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Translated from Turkish by Dayla Rogers
Heldenplatz
By Antonio Fian
The nerve. Everyone cheers for him on the Heldenplatz and then he goes and cuts deals with the Russians.
Translated from German by Tess Lewis
Mihama Nuclear Power Plant
Alpsdake, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Far Shore
By Yoko Tawada
In Yoko Tawada's dystopian tale, the entire Japanese archipelago is rendered uninhabitable when a fighter plane piloted by a teenager loses control and crashes into a recently reactivated nuclear plant.
Translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles
Nabokov in Brasov
By Mircea Cartarescu
I was asked to join Securitate.
Translated from Romanian by Julian Semilian
from The Banquet in Blitva
By Miroslav Krleza
Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza portrays a distinctly Balkan Everywhere of blended places and events in this surreal novel excerpt.
Translated from Croatian by Edward Dennis Goy & Jasna Levinger