From the vantage point of the peoples colonized by Russian rule — High in the mountains running along the border between Azerbaijan and Georgia, in the garrison town of Zaqatala, former outpost of the famed Imam Shamil who in the mid-nineteenth century led the longest resistance to Russian rule, I meet an elderly woman crossing the street. “Come inside and drink some…

When the stories we love change our lives — Chekhov was not my first love. More obviously delectable to a college freshman just returned from her first visit to St. Petersburg and discovering Russian literature for the first time were the thick novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Those “great, baggy monsters” (as Henry James called them) buoyed me up…

Why a forgotten genocide in the Caucasus matters today — Circassian history is known only in the broadest of outlines to regional specialists and not at all to most outside observers. The destruction of the Shapsug, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Ubykh, and Kabardian peoples — collectively called Circassian and resident for millennia on the north shore of the Black Sea — did…

What you can learn from the injustices done to other writers — Having a literary agent is the dream of many writers. Countless blog posts, forums, and writers’ handbooks begin with the question: How do you get a literary agent? …

Checkpoints on the border of Palestine and Israel as the architecture of occupation — On an average day, a Palestinian who works in Jerusalem and resides in the West Bank must wake up at four in the morning in order to arrive at work by nine. The reason is not the distance between workplace and home. …

This is a review of Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated by Elizabeth Grey (New Directions, 2022) 128 pp., $16.95 In a speech on the virtues of female chastity, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei informed an audience of young poets that it…

James Longenbach’s Forever —

How cryptocurrency helps Iranians evade sanctions At a time when millions of Iranian lives relied on Covid-19 vaccines being consistently refrigerated, the summer of 2021 was marked by frequent, dangerous power outages. Power cuts are hardly unusual in Iran, but these were caused by a new phenomenon. …

Achy Obejas’ new collection expands our sensibilities — “I and I alone spoke up and cried for insurrection and change,” says the speaker in “Boomerang, After Aimé Césaire,” the opening poem of Boomerang/Bumerán, a bilingual collection by Achy Obejas, published in 2021. In this book, the boomerang functions as both a thematic and formal motif. Several poems bear…