The tune is just three chords, the I, IV7, V7 progression common in Gospel and a lot of New Orleans music, suited to both exultation in the pews and good-natured debauchery. According to Mac (Dr. John) Rebennack, one of the many artists who covered i

Tamanda Kanjaye’s “Song of the Lake” is an exercise in surrendering to our sonic environments. It’s a moment of stillness amid noise and haste. Originally published by Doek! Literary Magazine, in Namibia, Kanjaye’s multimedia piece presents a triptyc

“Therefore I think my breast hath all/those pieces still, though they be not unite;” – John Donne, “The Broken Heart” The last man who touched my tits cut them off: finally a guy who understood me. He keeps saying I’m a “healthy guy” & I’m not sure i

Vanessa Hua’s latest novel, Forbidden City, is the story of an ambitious, savvy teenage girl and her rise to power alongside the leader of China’s cultural revolution. Initially, the novel had dual timelines: one in 1960s China and the other in 1970s

The opioid antagonist counteracts overdoses within minutes. But, for it to work, people have to show up for one another.

Things had always gone over the cliff. Peat bricks spent from burning, fish skeletons picked of flesh, tufts of gritty wool loosed from skeins. Elin’s uncle walked off its edge the year his health turned. He chose his exit one ordinary night, leaving

Armed soldiers were stationed here and there. Grannies wondered why we remained in the north. We should come home.

The artist talks about creating vibrant celebrations of Asian identity in her large yellow paintings.

In a hybrid text, Madeleine Slavick registers her protest against the gradual erosion of civil rights in Hong Kong.

The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows. A stranger had sent flowers to my house with a note that read say thank you. I walked from my car to my door like a snake oxbows across the sandy road from dune to dune. Balanced a colander fu

The bloodletting began, in its way, one thinly cold and sunny morning last spring, at the HmongTown Marketplace in the Frogtown section of Saint Paul, Minnesota. There are more than sixty-six thousand Hmong people in the Twin Cities area, the largest

A crop of new books attempts to explain the allure of conspiracy theories and the power of belief.

Jori Lewis’s book about the simple peanut began simply, with an image both familiar and foreign. When she first visited Senegal’s peanut farms, they looked so much like her family’s Arkansas lands, and yet nothing about the industry — long a staple o

The weather in my hometown is easy. Fairhope wags on the tail of Alabama, where the brackish waters of Mobile Bay tame briny gusts off the Gulf of Mexico. Humidity is a blanket, close to the skin. In summer, the sky collects water until it breaks int

It was hard to beat intelligence but impossible to beat stupidity, and 766 was brutally, inventively, stupid.

Okwiri Oduor first came to prominence in 2014, as the winner of the Caine Prize, Africa’s most prestigious short story prize. In her winning story, “My Father’s Head,” Okwiri’s narrator struggles to bring to mind a full image of her late father and l

In 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese anti-corruption activist and investigative journalist, was assassinated with a car bomb. A public inquiry into the assassination found the government of Malta responsible for the killing. In his short story

I. In the photo I find, taken around 1977, Kate Braverman’s Los Angeles is painted in opaque shades of blue, her color of possibility. Not quite sapphire — a particularly powerful hue — but the color wheel is spinning in that direction. Sylvia Plath

Our mother was a tiny stone, thrown around by something beyond her. Grandma was water, flowing to where it wanted, as it wanted, when it wanted.

Elaine Hsieh Chou wrote three different versions of her debut novel, Disorientation, a bitingly funny, searing indictment of the racism and whiteness of academia. “‘Interlude,’ Chou told Guernica, “is taken from the first version, which included four

An extremist group that began and grew in Somalia takes root in neighboring Kenya — and looks even further outward.

Travel is, deep down, an exercise in trust, and sometimes I think it was you who became my life’s most enduring teacher. I had every reason to be wary when, in 1985, I clambered out of the overnight train and stepped out into the October sunshine of

You can’t start with the thing. You have to start with something other than the thing. Like a stone entering water (the water closing up after it). On January 8, 1988, my uncle Steven hangs himself with a length of rope in the basement of his home. I

When Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama set out to write Walking the Bowl, a deeply reported look at the lives of street children in Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka, they began with what they didn’t know — exactly how many street children there are

Today, like other days of my conscious existence, my tongue is at war with a new language — fomenting a conflict of translation in my mouth — the wound flowering out of the crust of skin. I write in a language I do not think in, and dream in one diff

Folktales are highly local, passed from one generation of storytellers to another, shared in the intimacy of bardic circles. At their core, these tales speak of the cultures from which they originate. They symbolize unique realities while their edges

The pale white sack is made of rough, thickly woven cotton. It is tied with string at the top and bunched at the bottom. It dangles from my hand, almost touching the ground, its dense contents weighing around five kilos. I hesitate at the door of the

Tonight, in Ukraine, children will get on the ground and scrunch themselves up into little balls, trying to make themselves smaller. In bunkers, in the backs of cars, on trains. I imagine their small arms tight around their knees. I imagine that in t