Earlier this year, Yale University Press published the excerpt below from The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. We are revisiting this piece today to shed light on the continued and escalating tensions in the region. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the
Joshua Cohen— The Swiss writer Ludwig Hohl (1904–1980) spent the bulk of his final decades—the decades during which he received his only acclaim—living poor in a Geneva basement strung with clotheslines, from which he hung his pages like laundry out to dry. He’d finish a page and then decide where
Sonallah Ibrahim— As Fathy pulled the seat belt across his chest he said, “Please fasten your seat belt or we’re doomed. Traffic cops here are tough, nothing like in your country.” I almost said that it wasn’t our country anymore, but I didn’t want to start off with an argument.
Desiree C. Bailey— I was once invited to write a poem based on photographs of self-presentation housed at the International Center for Photography. One photograph stood out to me perhaps because of the verdant background, or because the subject, whom I perceived as a young Black woman, reminded me of
Laura Forsberg— It is a truism, by this point, that smartphones have revolutionized our lives. In less than fifteen years, we have developed new ways of communicating with friends and family, navigating through traffic, finding information, and making purchases. Smartphones have become such an essential part of our lives that
Sumana Roy— In How I Became a Tree, I was looking for people who had wanted to become or live like a tree. Since then, I’ve been trying to speculate in the opposite direction – what might it mean for plant life to live in the human social world? How I Became
Early this summer, we proudly released Duo Duo’s new collection of poems, Words as Grain. Lucas Klein, editor and translator of the career-spanning anthology, notes in his introduction that the poet’s early work has often been seen as an expression of the era, yet his poetry “has never been reducible
Zander Brietzke— On January 1, 1935 Eugene O’Neill outlined a series of four plays about four brothers (a ship captain, a gambler, a politician, and a railroad magnate) set in the second half of the nineteenth century. O’Neill called this group his Cycle because each play was to circulate the
Alexandra Dunietz— Would Sydney Taylor, author of the All-of-a-Kind books, have had a Facebook page? I usually avoid counterfactual history, but while helping June Cummins with research on Taylor, I occasionally wondered what she would have made of the internet. What makes me think she would have engaged in some
Susanna Braund— The Aeneid tells the story of the foundation of Rome by colonists from the East, refugees from the city of Troy in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) after it was sacked by the Greeks at the end of the ten-year Trojan War, an event to which scholars traditionally assign the