In a wide-ranging conversation that headlines World Literature Today’s November issue, we celebrate Ada Limón being named the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
With your latest passport to great reading, the editors are also excited to launch an ambitious new editorial initiative to offer a greater number of shorter pieces to help further diversify the magazine’s coverage and facilitate reader engagement from a wider variety of cultural angles. Through literature, music, film, food, and art, WLT is finding more ways than ever to connect you to the global cultural landscape of the 21st century.
This week’s @TheTLS , featuring André Aciman on Proust; Margaret Drabble on Robert Aickman; @LucyHH on Naples; @AnnPettifor on climate refugees; @scheffer_pablo on Nona Fernández; @IsabelleBaafi on the poetry of June Jordan, Wanda Coleman and Rita Dove – and more.
In the state’s midterms—which could determine the balance of the Senate and the integrity of the Presidential race in 2024—Democrats are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.
As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered?
Charles Glass – Although World War Three had come perilously close, Martin Indyk absolves Henry Kissinger: Soviet actions were ‘yet again characterised by an ultimate timidity in the face of American resolve’. ‘Resolve’ is one way of describing the risk of nuclear Armageddon. Another is ‘recklessness’.
Susan Pedersen – The problem with individual conscientious objection is that we are mutually dependent whether we acknowledge it or not. You may refuse to get vaccinated on grounds of conscience but will benefit from herd immunity if others do; you may refuse to pay taxes but will still get your rubbish collected; you may refuse to take up arms in war but will be protected from harm if others serve.
James Meek – If an innocuous merchant ship passing through the Baltic or the North Sea had a handful of ordinary, secretly armed trucks lashed to its deck, would any Nato country notice? Would the drones be detected or intercepted? If they were launched and hit their targets, could it ever be proven where they originated? As a threat to Europe, this is creative licence. But using swarms of Shahed-136s and other forms of missile to destroy a country’s energy system, on the eve of winter, is exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
Don’t miss the latest entry in our “Read Your Way Around the World” series, which will whisk you to the brightly hued streets of Reykjavík, or our excerpts from Bob Dylan’s new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” (In 1971, 45 years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Book Review opined, rather tartly, that “Dylan is not a literary figure. Literature comes in books, and Dylan does not intend his most important work to be read.”)
Cover for @nytimesbooks Junot Diaz’s review of Alan Moore’s new story collection “Illuminations”.
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.
American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano
Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1,001 Nights translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paulo Lemos Horta
The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.
No Bears a film written and directed by Jafar Panahi
A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Civilians describe being snatched from their homes and sent away for ideological screening, prolonged detention, and, in some cases, starvation and torture. Is there a larger plan at work?
Boomers Daily 