“Translation is a Political Act” Don Mee Choi has one of the most recognizable voices in poetry today. The poems in her last three books, Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation, with…

Jun 06, 2026 20:30 Uhr | Eintritt: frei | Ort: Lettrétage, Veteranenstr. 21, 10119 Berlin | Sprache: Englisch, multilingual

The 1983 book cover with the author’s original title. “the metaphysical decorum of calculation . . .” As the book opens, the narrator of A Fictional Inquiry and a “middle-ag…

“The seemingly unsolvable problem of Montevideo” Montevideo, the latest novel by Enrique Vila-Matas to be translated into English, is a tale of two rooms. As the novel opens, the namele…

“Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt” Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book…

“A small thing is a big thing seen from afar, a big thing is a small thing seen up close.” I’ve taken this quote from Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, but it f…

According to linguist David Crystal, once a person has learned to read, it is almost impossible to process the graphic marks that make up a letter as anything but a letter. At some point, we stop l…

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) is a novel I have looked forward to rereading for a lo…

André Breton’s Nadja is one of the cornerstone novels of French Surrealism. Published in 1928, the narrator, Breton himself, tells the story of meeting a woman on the streets of Paris and fin…

To photograph is to be profligate. I have thousands of digital images of my family and travels scattered across several cloud storage sites, my Flickr account, my hard drive, and a thumb drive. And…

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1955. Art Institute of Chicago Every moment is an interchangeable plat of stained irrelevent objects, and exits in guilt, emptiness, or the next plat. The end is useles…

from Stephen Downes’ novel Mural Photo-embedded literature—novels and books of poetry which use photographs as an essential element of the “text”—is a core interest of mine and has been somet…

“e cannot write e cannot tell memory and vocabulary not enough here neither dead nor alive before the king of the vast kingdom of grief. . .” As David Peace’s novel 1980 opens, it is early December…

Cillian Murphy of “Oppenheimer” fame plays an Irishman interrogating a system of abuse and forced labor, despite everyone’s warnings to look the other way.