Station Island: Seamus Heaney

Published by Faber & Faber, 1984, 123 pages. “I was stretched between contemplationof a motionless pointand the command to participateactively in history.”—Away from It All, quote from Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Definition The thread that runs through this collection the poet’s role in history and politics. Is the poet an observer or …

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The Hacienda: Isabel Cañas

Published by Solaris, 2023, 345 pages. Beatriz marries Rodolfo Solórzano, a wealthy landowner, to escape her circumstances as a poor relative who is treated by her aunt as a servant. But when she arrives at the Hacienda San Isidro, the home that is to be her domain, it is not at all as she had …

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Breaking the Veil of Politeness: An Interview with Usha Raman

Usha Raman is an Indian author and poet. She is also a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad. Her first novel, Polite Conversations, was published in 2024. Her other books include Writing for the Media (2010); a collection of poems, All the Spaces in Between (2009); and a children’s book, …

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Against the Loveless World: Susan Abulhawa

Published by Bloomsbury, 2020, 366 pages. “This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.”  “I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.” Nahr, a Palestinian woman, sits in …

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The Dark Side of Skin: Jeferson Tenório

Translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas LobatoPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 202 pages. Original version published in 2020. “Sometimes you’d have a thought and go to live inside it. Push everyone away. Build a house that way. Somewhere far. Deep inside yourself. That was how you dealt with things. These days, I choose to think …

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Murder in the Pettah: Jeanne Cambrai

Published by Penguin, 2001, 483 pages. The body of a young English woman is found in the Pettah—a disreputable part of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Not a place where you would wander around at night. So what was the young woman, Dorothy Bell, doing in the Pettah? Who killed her? Dorothy’s father, Reginald Bell, a wealthy …

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