Posted on January 26, 2022
"Who told you to read such a book?" So says a teacher to the young Habibe Jafarian in her memoir-essay, "For the Love of the Books," which describes growing up as a book-loving girl in Iran's most religious city.
Posted on January 13, 2022
Which experiences have a greater influence on us—our successes, or the times when we've been hurt? Frank Báez's bravura poem "Self-Portrait" makes an excellent case for the latter. It is an alternately humorous and horrifying catalog of a lifetime of mishaps, injuries, victimizations, and miscommunications, punctuated with a few moments that invoke the possibility of joy:
Posted on December 29, 2021
A man, a woman, a street, a chance meeting . . . A reader might consider all of this a setup for romance, but Évelyne Trouillot's short story "Detour" delivers something quite different.
Posted on December 15, 2021
Posted on December 08, 2021
We all know the story of Cinderella . . . or do we? In Ena Lucia Portela's mischievous update of the famous folktale, (translated into English by Pamela Carmell) the heroine is as virtuous, beautiful, and downtrodden as one might expect. But Cleis (as Cinderella is called here) also dreams of becoming a soap-opera villainess and knees a would- be assailant—the story's sole "prince"—in the crotch.