The Moscow Calendar’s Going Islamic; or, The Soviet Empire in Brodsky’s Poetry
Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer whose works are banned in Uzbekistan. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1994. Several of his Russian-language novels have appeared in English…
The Trobriand Tower of Babel
In late November 1978, a small plane went missing after it left Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea. The plane was en route to Losuia,…
Inventing a Nation: Jacques Roumain and Haitian Kreyòl
Haitian independence from France in 1804 led to a host of consequences for the first black republic in the world. Among them was a fraught relationship with the new nation’s…
Meskwaki Warparty: an Oral History
This war story was written in the Meskwaki language by Alfred Kiyana in about 1915 on the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, Iowa. It is among some 27,000 pages of…
Conversations: Rion Amilcar Scott and Bro. Yao
Rion Amilcar Scott I’ve attempted many times to render as fiction my first conversation with Hoke Glover III (or Bro. Yao as many know him). Such a scene has always…
Harold Bloom on Alvin Feinman’s Self-limiting Transcendence
I first met Alvin Feinman in September 1951, the day before I encountered another remarkable young man who also became a life-long friend, Angus Fletcher. Alvin was twenty-two, a year…
Tina Chow’s Articulate Silence
Tina Chow’s Kyoto and Saturn bracelets I was exuberant when I first imagined writing this essay. I have been obsessed with Tina Chow for years. When asked why, I was…
Words and Flesh: Observations on the American Soul
When you land in the United States, you can observe from a distance the world you are supposed to enter. For more than thirty years I lived in the opaque…
Something in My Pocket: Bakhtin, Freud, and South Park
South Park is obscenely violent, purposely grotesque, it holds nothing sacred, it is racist, sexist, homophobic as well as heterophobic, and abuses people of every political and demographic persuasion,…