Who’s to say just what it is that inspires a reader? To my mind, the writer who answers this question with the most force and clarity is Erri De Luca. But then, I would think that, since I translate him. Here’s what Erri says: “For those who stumble into a serendipitous reciprocity . . .
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For the last two years I’ve had the privilege of watching Serious Play Theater Ensemble develop its new production, Moving Water. As one of the photographers helping with this project, I have been enchanted by its action and imagery. The subject, however, is far from enchanting: it’s chilling. Fresh water is disappearing . . .
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Warfield Place, Northampton 12 July, 2021 Editor’s note: Below are opening remarks delivered by Kanshin Ruth Ozeki, novelist, Zen priest, Smith College professor, and resident of Warfield Place, followed by an abbreviated description of the ordination ceremony, and concluding with remarks delivered to the trees by Kosen Greg Snyder, senior Zen priest, co-founder of . . .
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(Photo: Nedim Grabovica/Xinhua/picture alliance) As we all know, the coronavirus pandemic will end only when it is defeated globally. One important obstacle, worldwide vaccine hesitancy, is likely to prove to be a more formidable barrier than, for example, equitable distribution. The politics and deceit that fuel vaccine hesitancy regrettably have longer shelf life . . .
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(Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID Director. Photo: NIAID) Seeing Albert Camus’s The Plague with 2020 Vision In the summer of 2020, seventeen Drexel University students, many of them international students, Zoomed into my Great Works class to explore Albert Camus’s The Plague. The students found themselves amazed at how eerily this World War Two allegory . . .
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A neighbor boy asked me what I remembered of the 1918 Flu Pandemic. I had to explain that, appearances aside, I wasn’t quite that old. But in fact, when I was very young the world was hit with a different epidemic, one I couldn’t comprehend at the time but which affected my . . .
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(Photo by Anne Ehrhart) Never saw the like of it before:four sets of railroad tracks on one side,four lanes of traffic on another,parking lots on either side, barelyspace for bushes and a patch of grass,an early April day, sun shining—and there, beside the fir tree, a fox.There, another. Smaller. And another!Three, four, . . .
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(Photo: “Caged,” by Achraf Baznani, used by courtesy of the artist) Diary with Broken Lines to Wile Away Viral Time Monday 6 April Is Sharif Elmusa afraid of Covid-19?Yes, Sharif Elmusa is afraid of Covid-19(apologies to Charles Simic for the paraphrase,hope he’s in good form). Life and death are not the glasshalf full . . .
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Editor’s note: What follows is a three-day selection from an ongoing project, one which has—in near simultaneity—been translated into several languages and published around the world. As Gonçalo M. Tavares’s English translator Daniel Hahn has remarked, the result looks “far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global . . .
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(Photo montage courtesy of Dejan Vekić) Sex, Money and Shakespeare In my second week of the lockdown in Denmark, a friend asked me to look again at Shakespeare’s sonnets for an academic anthology that she was planning. I am a fervent admirer of the sonnets, and when I started re-reading them yet . . .
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