At Chora, I purchased the inaugural issue of The Istanbul Review, edited by Hande Zapsu Watt, now available at many government-owned tourism sites in greater Istanbul. The 200+ page glossy includes brief interviews with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Gerhard Schröder, Elif Shafak, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Banana Yoshimoto, and an annoying Paolo Coelho. Highlights of the issue include [...]
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The Black Olive Tree and Other Memories
Translator Clare Sullivan recounts her experiences with indigenous women poets in Oaxaca, Mexico. “The women I met are custodians of culture and of memory. In their poetry, as in their stories, they combine nurturing and insight with fierceness and fire.”
Kwanini?’s Tiny Coups
The Kwani? Trust is Kenya’s premiere literary institution, anchored by their flagship publication, the omnibus journal Kwani?, roughly translatable from the Swahili as “What’s up?” Their reduplicative Kwanini? series features diminutive, perfect-bound fiction and creative nonfiction at chapbook length.
Fork Over the Gold: Yuri Rytkheu’s Chukchi Bible
Boris Dralyuk catalogues false interpretations—backed unfortunately by Winchesters—and contextualizes the Chukchi people within the Soviet sociopolitical mindset in his appreciative review of Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible.
Masochism is Another Form of Elitism
Brian Hewes reviews Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, finding it enjoyable but ultimately unconvincing for its utopianism.
Australia Briefly
Profiles of Sand, the new collaborative book by Robert Drewe and John Kinsella, and Kinsella’s Divine Comedy, a psycho-geographical explortion of Dante’s famous trilogy set on the five-acre plot of farmland where he grew up.
Molossus.co Presents!
Continuing a great tradition of collaboration with the Silver Lake Jubilee, Molossus is proud to invite its readers to the Molossus.co Presents AZTEX+PORN+STALIN, featuring Boris Dralyuk, Katherine Factor, Piotr Fiorczyk, Sesshu Foster, Geoff Nicholson, and Zak Smith.
Black in White America
Nathan French reviews the new Getty Publications facsimile reissue of Leonard Freed’s 1967 photo-essay classic Black in White America, declaring it a resonant history and relevant contemporary critique.
NY Hipsters + Poetism
David Shook briefly reviews two recent well-designed books, one by a multidisciplinary trio of New York hipsters that includes Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and one by founding Czech surrealist Vítězslav Nezval, translated by Jennifer Rogers.
Social Nonfiction
Syd Shook and Ryan Bell review new books on climate change and place, including work by Collectif Argos and Wendell Berry.
40 Percent Saline: A Conversation with Travis Elborough
I’ve been to Dover Beach, and suffice it to say I was not impressed. I mean, where are the piña coladas?
Baloney’s Not the Answer
Teun Voeten is not the first to document the lives of the people living in the tunnel systems of New York City. His newly updated account, Tunnel People, is unique, however, because of Voeten’s commitment not only to his craft, but also to the people.