Editor’s note: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 marks seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz. In a recent novel, the Italian writer Erri De Luca reflects on his visit to the camp during the ’90s. My Yiddish came from obstinacy. I first wanted to learn it after returning from the ceremonies marking the . . .
Read MoreIn this video blog, Massachusetts Review editor and translator Jim Hicks reads selections from the English translation of Erri De Luca’s A Dissenting Word. De Luca is currently being tried in Italy for expressing — during an interview on the Italian site of the Huffington Post — his solidarity with the Susa Valley’s NO TAV activists, a . . .
Read MoreRasha Abbas and her English translator Alice Guthrie read original stories and nonfiction from Syria. The reading is accompanied by the Layaali Arabic Music Ensemble, with a program of all Syrian music, featuring master oud player Kinan Idnawi.
Read MoreYesterday morning Charlie Hebdo hit the newstands in France and sold out within minutes. The cover of this “survival issue”—the newspaper’s first since two armed gunmen slaughtered eight of its journalists, killing four others as well at its Paris offices—appeared with the title, “All is pardoned,” and featured a caricature of Muhammed wearing an . . .
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The 2015 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Sarah Sousa, for her poem, “Her Moods Caused Owls,” published in Volume 55, Issue 3. Sarah Sousa’s first collection, Church of Needles, won the 2013 Red Mountain Prize and was published by Red Mountain Press in 2014. Her second collection, Split the Crow, was published January . . .
Read MoreTo die with a pencil in your hand, a box of colors, as you sketch a pratfall for some tyrant or other, using the unrivaled instrument of the smile. From the page before them they must have raised their eyes toward the hooded assassins—the ones who didn’t dare show their faces. They . . .
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Cincinnati, OhioJanuary 2, 2015 Yesterday, January 1, 2015, marked the two hundred and eleventh anniversary of Haiti’s independence. In ten more days, January 12, 2015, Haiti, Haitians, and Haiti allies will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 Richter scale earthquake that left 316,000 people dead, thousands more injured, and an approximate . . .
Read MoreYou know the call, so here I’ll simply turn it to task: “Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!” “Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!” After these long years of hate, and after this, our nation’s latest failed Reconstruction, what else could we expect? Justice? Democracy? Some measure of public institutions . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Six) Lesson Seven: Wanting It “One has but to look to see that, wherever one does not come by such knowledge by pounding it into one’s head by tough experience, it falls flat. It can neither be imported nor . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Five) Lesson Six: I Must Be Mistaken Amazingly, the MOOC I took graded students based solely on peer reviews. In fact, this is the case in every course Coursera offers that requires students to complete assignments that “do not . . .
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