When I was a boy a boy when I was boy I thought the language was a language Would send me everywhere there was to go. I thought there was…
In her essay “The Date,” Brenda Miller talks about the photos we hang on our refrigerators, photos of ourselves with those we love. We originally hang them to remind ourselves…
In R. K. Narayan’s novel The Guide (1958) a common con-man, “Railway” Raju, asks for a few choice morsels under the guise of a religious requirement. He’s begging from the…
Translations emit. They pull us in and push at us at once. Emit, that curious word: it’s time spelt backward. Translation makes time go backward. Translation’s process … helps me…
It is commonplace for citizens of liberal, democratic nations to believe that despotism is foreign to their own experiences. Their political constitutions display in some form or other a separation…
In 1939, as London braced itself for the bombs, the National Gallery’s paintings were moved to the dining room of Penrhyn Castle, North Wales. It wasn’t necessarily safer. Martin Davies,…
I first read Helen Ferguson/Anna Kavan in 1997 or 1998 when I was living in Ansan, an industrial city an hour subway ride from Seoul. Every few months I’d receive…
Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from Of Silence and Song, a book of essays, fragments, and poems forthcoming from Milkweed Editions (December 2017). Reading Hesiod on the shuttle bus to the…
On the night of September 19, 2017, I find a small map online of the oval park in front of my father’s house with its surrounding streets that extend out…