How Langston Hughes saw the Soviet Union and how it changed my life — We are all colonized.— marginalia in a library copy of Dominance Without Hegemony by Ranajit Guha, Indian historian The reader of Langston Hughes’s writings on the Soviet experiment is bound to be confused. In the 1930s, during the peak of Stalinist repression, Hughes produced volumes praising the Soviet Union, particularly…

The meaning of solidarity with Palestine — The world’s attention has been transfixed by Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza. Palestinian voices and narratives have begun to filter through the mainstream American media channels that have suppressed their voices for decades. When the Israeli military bombed al-Jalaa Tower, which housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices…

She wanted to make love to books, with her hands — When she was awarded a year-long fellowship in Budapest, Sarah Wallace was given the opportunity to invite anyone she wanted, anywhere in the world, to visit her during her stay in Hungary. She invited a famous scholar whose book she adored, and he declined. And then she remembered Yasin, the…

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? To these sources, it seems that all a writer needs to do is secure an agent, and every other problem, from finding…

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. A surge in cryptocurrency mining…

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…

A journey in verse from Syria to Germany — Syrian Palestinian writer Ramy Al-Asheq opens this new collection with the declaration “I have no head, no name, no identity. I gathered these pieces while fully believing that reality needs me to be a writer more than a poet.”…

Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd distils lessons from injustice — Born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd achieved international fame amid this year’s Israeli assault on Gaza and East Jerusalem. Although his credentials as a writer and activist have long been known to followers of Palestinian politics, his debut collection, Rifqa, introduces us…

Poems by Congolese poet Alain Mabanckou As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth is the first English-language release of poems by Congolese Francophone poet Alain Mabanckou. The volume includes two collections by the Congolese poet as well as an essay, entitled, essay “An Open Letter to Those Who…