June 16, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said. I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.” Read More
March 10, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Spring Issue By Emily Stokes As a child, the writer and activist Sarah Schulman memorized the whole of Bertolt Brecht’s Weimar-era play The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill. “I glommed onto that record so bad,” she tells Parul Sehgal in her Art of Nonfiction interview in our new Spring issue. “I listened to it over and over and over and over and over.” Read More
September 27, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Hannah Arendt, Poet By Srikanth Reddy Hannah Arendt, 1958. Photograph by Barbara Niggl Radloff. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them. Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue. Read More
July 11, 2024 A Letter from the Editor The Ringo Starr of the Haiku Pantheon By Srikanth Reddy If you attended school in the U.S. like I did, the first poem you wrote as a child was, more likely than not, some version of the Japanese haiku. As a grown-up, you may have gone on to read the haiku masters Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson—the Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison of Edo-period Japan. But most Western readers have yet to twig on to Masaoka Shiki, the Ringo Starr of the haiku pantheon. Born more than two hundred years after Basho, this latecomer to the declining literary form launched a haiku revival in late-nineteenth-century Japan, writing haiku about modern subjects like baseball (“dandelions / the baseball rolled / through them”) and penning a memorable little essay titled “Haiku on Shit.” By the time of his death from tuberculosis at thirty-four, Shiki had written nearly twenty thousand verses and founded a new school of haiku poetry with its own literary magazine, Hototogisu, which continues to publish haiku today. Read More
June 18, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.” The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”) Read More
March 19, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Spring Issue By Emily Stokes Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways. Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides. Read More