"Big Familia" follows Juan Gutierrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his f...

Though none of us can predict our own futures, there are distinctive factors – individual and collective – that may forcibly turn our attention toward the uncertain.  In the poems in Brightword the speaker, a mother, contemplates the microcosm and ma...

Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, "Character"...

From the writer of the delightful utopian fantasy "Sultana's Dream" come these witty tales describing the twists and turns of India's two-hundred-year relationship with the Imperial British. Available to contemporary English readers for the first tim...

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as "one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover o...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvik Vaculik has writer's block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powe...

In "Civil Bound", Myung Mi Kim turns a keen ear to language as the mechanism by which society operates. The poems engage multiple methods to make sense of this pervasive tool, its powers, nuances, and influences over the structure of our civilization...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is eminently, delightfully, and delectably quotable. This truth goes far beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice, which has muscled out many other excellent sentences. So many gems of wit a...

"Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes", said Stamford, introducing us."How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive". "How on earth did you kno...