Prior
Dispatch
Island in the Sand
Anthony Ham
Surrounded by sand dunes poised like giant waves above the town, Araouane could soon disappear forever beneath the sands.
Poetry Dispatch
Ashes
Kwame Dawes and Andre Lambertson
A series of paired photographs and poems that document the effects of deprivation, poverty, and racism on young people in the United States.
Dispatch
A Jungle Tiananmen
Kelly Hearn
The friction between jungle dwellers, oil companies, and development-hungry governments in recent years has led to heightening tensions.
Essay
Leaving Trinity
Matt Donovan
We’re standing in a fenced-in field near the center of the crater made by the bomb; it is, in truth, a slight depression in the earth almost impossible to see.
Recent Books
A Gentle and Angry Instrument: Robert Walser’s Short Fiction
Jacob Silberman
Walser called it his “pencil system” or “pencil method,” and it has also been described as “microscript” and “micrography.” The writing technique entailed shrinking down letters to only 1 or 2 mm in height.
Editor’s Desk
The Voice of the Revolution
Ted Genoways
To tell this side of life in Iran—the personal side, the side of longing and heartbreak—we asked a pair of Iranian-born writers to assemble a special portfolio of work by writers from Iran. They gathered intimate portraits of love curbed by Sharia law and separation imposed by political imprisonment.
Essay
Leaving Trinity
Matt Donovan
We’re standing in a fenced-in field near the center of the crater made by the bomb; it is, in truth, a slight depression in the earth almost impossible to see. Six bikers pose, arm in arm, at the lava-rock obelisk which marks the precise spot of the explosion; a group of Texans wait their turn.
Poetry
This Particular Tartar
Habib Tengour
This particular Tartar is waiting beside a side road. He’s been squatting and moping there for a while. He would rather wait there than beside the highway with cars rushing by at full speed.
Tangofugue
Temple Cone
What miracle is left to believe? Perhaps if I picked up a violin / And played Bach’s partita in G minor with my untrained hands, / I’d hear the world a new way, my fingertips whirling into ears.
Inside Iran
Their Black Imaginings: Letters from an Exiled Wife to Her Imprisoned Husband
Fatemeh Shams
Political dissident Mohammad Reza was sent to Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. He was put on televised trial with a group of Iran’s brightest minds. During those darkest days, his wife wrote these letters to him.
Lust, Devotion, & the Binary Code
Kamin Mohammadi
While everyone slept after lunch, we would sit in puddles of sunlight in the central courtyard of the house, talking and laughing while I longed to enfold him in my arms. I learned restraint and a sort of modesty, and how to read between the lines, how to leave things unsaid.
How to Build a Bomb
Kaveh Bassiri
Begin with fear paradise around wall a boy // No begin in the middle / my grandmother said a bird in the hand is / a shackle’s reaction . . .
From The Archives
Lessons from Iran (1952)
Elizabeth Monroe
Poverty, hunger, and a lead from a dissatisfied intelligentsia are three of the main ingredients of revolution. The first two are already present in Iran. If the third were to develop, upheaval would be almost inevitable.
The Changing United States Policy in the Middle East (1964)
R.K. Ramazani
The “revolutionary changes in military technology” cannot eliminate the strategic value of the Middle East so long as the possibility of conventional warfare remains constant.
