Articles for Translation: Feminism and Volunteering

In the lead up to International Women's Day, we shine a spotlight on the incredible contributions of UN Volunteers and Online Volunteers around the globe. From grassroots-level support to community initiatives, volunteers lead the charge for change, exemplifying the strength of collective action. Breaking stereotypes, bridging barriers, and paving the way for an equal and sustainable future for women and girls everywhere.

J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder is generally considered to be the first fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, or “superintelligence.” This is a familiar trope for readers of science fiction today, but when the novel was originally published in 1911 it was anything but. What intellectual soil needed to be tilled before this idea could sprout?Article […]

In the summer of 2023, a few weeks after the first portion of my advance for my next two books arrived via direct deposit in my checking account, I bought tickets to Adele’s Las Vegas residency concert. I booked a hotel room with a tub and upgraded myself and my then-boyfriend, now-husband Bram to premium […]

Toni Morrison’s only staged play ‘Dreaming Emmett’ ran for four weeks to mixed reviews and Morrison later asked for copies of the play not to circulate. Why did the novelist’s only staged drama disappear for so long?

Like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness. The gender-critical feminists, in particular, have held it up as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women and, by extension, the pathological character of all transfeminine desire. I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of toxic masculinity. On the contrary, I am imagined as a slave to my own perversions, as a narcissist fixated on my own physical appearance, as someone broken, dominated, violated, manipulated—in short, as hopelessly feminized.

Sophie Lewis’s new book opens up possibilities for excitement about what feminism could be—if only we could sit with its past.

“In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

Strength training became an artistic practice for one best-selling novelist

Kara Rota in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld about Sittenfeld’s new short story collection.

Kara Rota in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld about Sittenfeld’s new short story collection.

Isabella Hammad reckons with literature’s role in witnessing war and genocide, tracing how Sitt Marie-Rose speaks to the present crisis.

The Nation Magazine

Noam Chomsky’s best-known political contribution is his powerful, long-running critique of US foreign policy. But Chomsky has also used his global platform to sound the alarm about the climate crisis and chart a path away from disaster.

The video starts with ominous, staticky music interrupted by the crackle of military comms, as we see rapidly cut footage of full-fatigue soldiers defending a first-floor redoubt in a dusty urban area. Balaclava-clad baddies fire RPGs, as a gritty voiceover explains the perils of house-to-house combat. As things get complicated, the soldiers make a frantic […]

“The False Friends” They laid their hands upon my head, They stroked my cheek and brow; And time could heal a hurt, they said, And time could dim a vow. And they were pitiful and mild Who whispered to me then,“The heart that breaks in April, child, Will mend in May again.” Oh, many a […]

By the summer of 1913, it had been nearly a year since Kafka and Felice Bauer had begun corresponding, and several months since they’d started speaking of marriage. Speculatively at first, hypothetically, but at some point those weightless words had solidified into a commitment and then, worse still, a plan. For Kafka, this initiated a […]

Many years ago, right before I quit my job as a book publicist, a coworker knocked on my office door and asked me if I wanted to accompany her to a reading. Stressed, distracted and with one tote bag out the door, I didn’t have the bandwidth to formulate a remorseful reply. “Oh, I would,” […]

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in June 2006. Dressed up in a fluffy hood and gown, parading down the street under the eyes of fascinated tourists, I felt caught, not for the first time, between the past and the future. For eight hundred years, Cambridge has been pumping out household names: writers, actors, […]

The birthplace of the human race. The oldest inhabited landmass on the planet. Ancient. Seeded with ancestral memory. One could say mythology and folklore from the African continent are some of the oldest stories in the world. I was born and raised in Cameroon, a West/Central African country. Growing up, I was exposed to a […]

In the author’s note to her next to last novel, Wildcat Dome, Yuko Tsushima explains the provenance of the book’s title by invoking the nuclear testing that the United States conducted on the Bikini Atoll islands, as well as the Enewetak Atoll and the Marshall Islands, from 1945-1958:Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads The people who […]

How lucky, I thought, that spring break at the college at which I teach should be scheduled the week before the launch of my second novel. I wouldn’t have to cancel any classes to make the pre-publication interviews, furious essay-writing, bookstore signings, prep for the upcoming book tour.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads Thus far, on […]

Why set a novel on a train? The answer might seem obvious: it’s a narratively and atmospherically rich space, an enclosure in which strangers are cooped up, each with their own different reason for making the journey. If I were using a contemporary Amtrak as a location, say, the train would be primarily a narrative […]

March has already been a month of manias and mind-boggling political moments, and I feel, as perhaps everyone nodding to the madcap political moment does, like a broken record. Still, I’ll say something else I always say, as it is also true: that art is a beautiful bit of stability in the chaos, and there’s […]

New York is all about water.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads Reasonable people may disagree with this assertion. Surely New York is about trade, finance, power. Fashion, food, art, media, design. Fusions and factions. Wall Street and Broadway. Skyscrapers and boroughs. Yes, but water flows beneath and around all of these. If the coastline of the […]

New York is all about water.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads Reasonable people may disagree with this assertion. Surely New York is about trade, finance, power. Fashion, food, art, media, design. Fusions and factions. Wall Street and Broadway. Skyscrapers and boroughs. Yes, but water flows beneath and around all of these. If the coastline of the […]

A hugely influential novelist and critic, Solstad won the Norwegian Critics prize three times, and his work was translated by Haruki Murakami

Chesterland, Ohio, 1979Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads I’m six years old and watching my two older brothers roll dice on the orange linoleum tiles in the basement. If I move a muscle, I’ve been warned—if I speak so much as a single word—my banishment to the upstairs will be reinstated. Mark, our middle brother, crouches […]

A nurse named Sylvia brought me into the operating room, where she introduced me to two more specialist nurses – I was too stressed to catch their names. They were going to thread a plastic line through a vein in my arm all the way to my heart. Eyes smiling from behind their PPE, they […]

For a long time, I carried around a vague idea for an immigrant novel. While I knew it would be inspired in part by my own experience coming to America, I’d have scoffed at the idea that an Indian college graduate teaching at a Boston-area private school while harboring dreams of becoming a writer would […]

“Reading Frost requires a kind of modesty and curiosity. Coming to this modesty has been a big part of my own experience with him. At first, I was reading a lot of the poems and thinking, This is dumb.”

“PLEASE wake up! No matter what cavern idiots tell you in the back of your mind, look at these stones and understand what they are! How can anyone ignore these marvelous ancient picture books?”

“When I mentioned Ọlábísí Àjàlá to my Yoruba teacher she told me he died a bad death. He also liked women too much.”

“The Minotaur more than justifies the existence of the Labyrinth.” –Jorge Luis Borges *Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads One of the most monstrous things I have ever seen was on a family holiday to Southern France when I was about twelve years old. After days spent swimming and playing fractious family tennis matches, we decided […]

The job was quickly organised by my father so I could repay the money I had borrowed for my travels and debaucheries. I had never done much photocopying or sat at a computer. I still hadn’t thought of death or madness. I’d never felt the rabid terror of my obsolescence drawing nearer every day. I […]

Joshua Rothman on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025,” and the need for voices from outside the artificial-intellgience industry.

“His response to Henry’s desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he’d rather not have his brother around.”

Sarah McEachern reviews Clarice Lispector’s “Covert Joy: Selected Stories.”

Novels about writing groups, literary movements, and secret artistic societies

More than a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Bad Feminist,” where I grappled with my relationship to feminism through cultural criticism. The title was a bit tongue-in-cheek—catchy and provocative. I believed in feminism then as I do now, understood its importance, but I also worried that I fell woefully short of what a […]

When #MeToo happened, everything women wrote about rape outside reportage was crowned by the same bloody image—Judith Beheading Holofernes—by the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. You’d think all of us were running around planning to cut men’s heads off, but I’ll admit, back then, I sort of was. I wanted my rapists dead. I boiled […]

One of the first stories I’d published was about a highly dysfunctional family. After reading it, my mother called me. She was livid. “How could you?” she asked. “You’ve humiliated us.”Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads I was confused. The story bore no resemblance to our family, but my mother said, “I know it’s not us. […]

One of the first stories I’d published was about a highly dysfunctional family. After reading it, my mother called me. She was livid. “How could you?” she asked. “You’ve humiliated us.”Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads I was confused. The story bore no resemblance to our family, but my mother said, “I know it’s not us. […]

Amy Reed-Sandoval considers feminist anti-fascism in the writings of Verónica Gago.

The authors of the celebrated novels ‘Wandering Stars’ and ‘Martyr!’ are each other’s valued early readers. “We both wrote when no one gave a shit that we were writing,” Akbar tells VF. “It’s fun to have a low-stakes way of playing the language game with one of your best pals.”

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic is experiencing a renaissance. This makes more sense than you might think.

The Nation Magazine

When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is...

I always hated “realistic” fiction. What I mean is slice–of–life type writing in which it’s just people’s feelings and observations and no one does anything, there’s no plot, no conflict. My father was a scientist, a biologist. He was a hard–working, smart person, and he came to the US on a visa for priority workers, […]

In my early twenties, I worked one summer as domestic help in a private residence for rich male university students in New York City. As part of our training, we women were taught to close all the doors to all the rooms we entered and follow a strict schedule as we moved around the house […]

Many Americans fantasize about living closer to the land. But how do you fight to keep that dream open for all?

“Lovers of Franz K.,” the latest novel by Burhan Sönmez, is the first to be written in his native Kurdish.

Wilhelm Reich promised freedom from fascism and bad sex through breath. But what happens when endless enjoyment becomes required?

The mother-daughter relationship in Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction is a stand-in for the relationship between the American nation-state and the Nisei male citizens.

"What emerges throughout The Orchards of Basra is how fragile and prone to disintegration the borders of identity are," writes critic Alex Tan.

If you’ve spent any time around books in the last five years, you’ve heard at least a dozen romance tropes: enemies to lovers, age gap, grumpy-sunshine. These shorthands describing the dynamics of a novel’s central couple have all had their day in the sun and in SEO. But there’s a new, exciting, micro-trend in both […]

For six years, I toggled between two worlds. By day, I was buried in microfiche, trial transcripts, and yellowing sermons, researching a biography of the long-dead evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. At night, I turned to fiction—stories that felt like echoes of the one I was researching. They were about women coming undone. Women vanishing. Women, […]

“Mean Girl” is a ruinous label. Just like “social climber,” once it’s attached to you, it’s impossible to shake. It’s no surprise that these two identities frequently overlap for the women of classic literature.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads “Mean Girl” is a devastating charge because it hinges on perception rather than proof—once Becky Sharp is […]

“Mean Girl” is a ruinous label. Just like “social climber,” once it’s attached to you, it’s impossible to shake. It’s no surprise that these two identities frequently overlap for the women of classic literature.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads “Mean Girl” is a devastating charge because it hinges on perception rather than proof—once Becky Sharp is […]

I first started listening to folk music in my late teens. Before that, I was only really familiar with Irish rebel songs, sung by my family on whiskey-fueled evenings at home. But English folksongs were different—dark and knotty, not so concerned with the nation as with the violence between men and women, and between the […]

When I graduated from college I started working in the movie business, first as a production assistant then in the camera department. It was an exciting time for indie films in New York.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads A passionate community of people in their twenties was banding together to make low-budget movies. We used to […]

“I attrybute my suksess in life to mi devoshun to spelyng.” –Josh Billings *Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads Simplified spelling looks silly. There’s no getting around that. For most readers today, the mere sight of words like “nolej” or “edukayshun”—or any of the countless others pushed by the “simplified spelling movement” in its centuries-long quest […]

I wish I could remember when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—I must have been around twenty—but I certainly remember how much I loved it, which has only grown with every reread. I had already become a serious reader of crime fiction, immersed in the works of contemporary crime writers in addition […]

After several late nights scrolling through Instagram, I chance upon the perfect image for the cover of my memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. Taken by a Vietnamese street photographer, the image is a long shot of an intersection; at the top, a truck is entering the frame while a car is exiting, and […]

Like many other Native American peoples, the Cherokees were masters of metaphor when it came to negotiation with European colonial authorities. Examples abound across generations, expressed in periods of crisis and less momentous occasions. For illustrative purposes, consider a speech made by chief Kanagatucko (Standing Turkey) in September 1761 when Cherokees moved toward peace with the […]

Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads Jonathan Coe’s The Proof of My Innocence, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower Than the Angels, and Dan Nadel’s Crumb, all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads 1. The Fact Checker by […]

I used to think of the coming-of-age story as a predominantly teenaged genre: first loves, failed friendships, big mistakes, the mean girls and bad boys of high school hallways and college campuses. But in recent years, many of the best new novels are about finding yourself and a trajectory that feels right in your twenties, […]