Blog

Introducing The View from Gaza

December 8, 2024 - By Jim Hicks and Britt Rusert, for the editors

Every evening, in times like these, there are tough choices to be made, a great number of commitments to honor, and multiple places where one ought to be. So, of course, not even all our local supporters were able to join us last Friday at UMass’s Old Chapel for our meditation and celebration of this year’s very special issue, The View from Gaza, featuring a video presentation from some contributors as well as a live reading by Amherst College poet-in-residence George Abraham and a performance by the Arabic music ensemble Layaali.

On the blog this week, we will bring you special moments from that celebration as well as other features related to the new issue, including an essay from Noura Kamal, titled “A New Generation is Emerging, and Gaza is their...

susan abulhawa: Address to the Oxford Union

December 3, 2024 - By susan abulhawa

Editor’s note: On November 28, 2024, the Oxford Union debated the resolution: "This house believes that Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide."

Israeli academic Gerald Steinberg, invited to oppose the motion, published a diatribe against the Oxford Union for considering such a debate. Israeli historian Benny Morris agreed to speak in opposition, then withdrew at the last moment. The opposing team threatened to cancel the debate unless they were allowed to add a fourth speaker, Mosab Hassan Yousef, a former Palestinian spy. The final team opposing the proposition consisted of UK Lawyers For Israel Charitable Trust...

10 Questions for Yuemin He

December 2, 2024 - By Staff

Your mouth feels bitter if you haven’t spoken for long
Not speaking for a long time, this bitterness
occurs, like a gallbladder
full of darkness and in darkness trembling
—from "Bitterness in the Mouth" by Zhang Zhihao, Translated by Yuemin He

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Valdmir Nabokov for his penetrating thinking, erudition, and beautiful language command from reading Lolita, Pale Fire, etc.

Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji for its simplicity

Works by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei, and other traditional Chinese poets for their sheer beauty

Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot for helping me dwelling in the...

No Longer

November 29, 2024 - By Zeina Azzam

The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.
                                                                                              ...

10 Questions for Alan Grostephan

November 18, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first translation project was poems and short stories by young Colombian writers for Historias de vida y muerte/ Stories of Life and Death. That writing came from workshops I taught in Cazucá, a slum south of Bogotá where many of the writers had been displaced by violence and rural poverty. The poems are raw, intimate, fearless, and some are by writers so young they had not even learned how to use a cliché yet.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
As an undergraduate, I took a Latin American literature...