What Squid Game Is Really About 

How decades of Korean trauma have spawned a pop culture phenomenon 

Haunting the Homeland

Germany has all but forgotten the frenzy of witch trials and wonder doctors of the postwar period—but why?

Two Poets and a Word

The whole of creation, in just three letters

Grace

“On Living” by Nâzim Hikmet

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Kelly Knaga

Garden Party

My Guidebook to Japan

Lessons from Thoreau learned in a distant land

A Literary Love Letter to Egypt

The story of Cairo’s first modern bookstore

Facing Death at the Ends of the Earth

The discovery of the world’s oldest rock offers a hefty dose of perspective

Villamil

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

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