In late October 2000, Alia Malek, the American daughter of Syrian immigrant parents, started work as a civil rights lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department. She then watched the newly-elected Bush Administration re-direct …more

Wendell Steavenson’s memoir of her time as a freelance foreign correspondent in Tblisi, Georgia, begins in her former Time Magazine office, where she and her friend Nina spin escape fantasies under the world map tacked above their desks. Nina has stuck her pin in Pamplona. Steavenson has chosen Tblisi, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

“Yeah, Wendell, but why the hell Georgia?” Nina wants to know. …more

I met Chris Tarry on the Thursday of AWP, on the mobbed second floor of a popular blues bar in Adams Morgan, after a friend and I had been gonged out of a literary talent show by Pam Houston. …more

Between 1915 and 1970, six million African-Americans left the oppression of the Jim Crow South to find freedom in California and the northern states. Most traveled by rail, with those in the Southeast taking the Seaboard Air Line up the East Coast to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. The most popular destination for southern African-Americans arriving in New York was the crown jewel of Black America: Harlem. …more

This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love. …more

A poet named Homeless and his friend Berlioz, the editor of a literary magazine, sit on a park bench at the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, drinking apricot soda and discussing a poem Homeless has written about Jesus.   …more

The great thing about Russian literature is how strange it is.

The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there. “What on earth does it mean to ‘fly at’ somebody?” David Foster Wallace once asked, in an exasperated footnote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s literary biography of the Russian novelist. …more

The problem is that there is no clear path to literary success, no way to know what you’re supposed to do. …more

If you’re not familiar with Dan Baum’s story, start here. …more