Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet’s mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims ..read more

“While we ate, we bombed Lviv / And after entered / The wrinkled water, elders first / In the smoke of barbecues / Clanged dragonflies,” from “While we slept, we bombed Kharkiv,” by Maria Stepanova (trans. Ainsley Morse ..read more

“in society we are like streams / made up of some kind of force / and until we become visible / we don’t exist / for the people who make decisions // and i feel guilty about this / that i wasn’t visible,” from “Monologue of a Russian Woman #4,” by Maria Malinovskaya ..read more

“mama it’s not black and white / we’re the bad guys, we’re fools / it’s the phantoms in the kitchen / circling around your foot,” from “‘mama is reading a history of russian death’,” by Konstantin Shavlovsky ..read more

“mama it’s not black and white / we’re the bad guys, we’re fools / it’s the phantoms in the kitchen / circling around your foot,” from “‘mama is reading a history of russian death’,” by Konstantin Shavlovsky ..read more

“mama it’s not black and white / we’re the bad guys, we’re fools / it’s the phantoms in the kitchen / circling around your foot,” from “‘mama is reading a history of russian death’,” by Konstantin Shavlovsky ..read more

“too late to cry over bridges too late to build bridges too late to say too late to loved ones / too late to embrace them,” from “'“too late to scroll through news and facebook . . .’,” by Alexander Skidan (trans. by Kevin M. F. Platt & Ivan Sokolov ..read more

is a rich puzzle of personal and historical narratives on the dilemma of postcolonial identity and futures. The following essay traces many of the novel’s cinematic, cultural, and political filiations ..read more

A woman sweeping the Moscow metro with a twig broom, a violinist playing a Beatles tune, and Chekhov: Philip Metres reflects on his time on fellowship in Moscow, 1992, and Soviet nostalgia ..read more

This essay is a stroll through the oeuvre of the 2022 Neustadt Prize winner, Boubacar Boris Diop. It offers a foray into his formative years, followed by an exploration of the most salient aspects of his fictional writing ..read more