In Zimbabwe, Literature Is Protest

A New Generation of Authors Are Giving Voice to the Post-Mugabe Reality

In November 2017, when a military coup removed Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s head of state after 37 years of rule, euphoria gripped the whole country. Many saw it as an end to “the house of hunger”—the title of a widely read 1978 novel by Dambudzo Marechera that described the people’s suffering under tyranny.

Poet Philani A. Nyoni captured the excitement vividly in a stanza of a poem he composed on the day Mugabe stepped down:

The poem appears in his book Philtrum, which candidly expresses the bitterness that gripped the country during …

by Beaven Tapureta | October 5, 2020

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One

A Scholar of Shakespeare Sees Perils and Possibilities in the Bard’s Plays, and His Own Experience

by Jeffrey R. Wilson | September 28, 2020

I once tried to commit suicide. Twenty years later, it’s still hard to talk about. I didn’t want to die. Self-esteem issues, depression, alcoholism. I was signaling, in an unhealthy …

There’s a Special Place in Dante’s Purgatory for Wafflers and Neutral Souls | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

There’s a Special Place in Dante’s Inferno for Wafflers and Neutral Souls

From MLK and JFK to Gavin Newsom, Dante’s Misquoters Still Get to the Heart of the Poet’s Disdain for Moral Cowardice

by Guy P. Raffa | August 31, 2020

Dante’s Divine Comedy, an epic poem recounting the Florentine’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, remains the go-to guide to the afterlife, the world’s most famous travelogue for the great …

In 1910, Jack London Saw COVID Coming

In The Scarlet Plague, the California Author Imagined a 21st-Century Epidemic Hitting the Bay Area and the World

by Joe Mathews | April 14, 2020

Jack London saw this coming. So why didn’t we?

In 1910 the California author, already famous for The Call of the Wild and White Fang, wrote a short post-apocalyptic …

How Venezuela’s Oil Riches Fueled a Literary Explosion

In the Mid-20th Century, Writers Seized on the Conflicts Laid Bare by Petroleum’s Power to Reshape Society

by José González Vargas | October 5, 2018

On December 14, 1922, a gusher of petroleum was discovered in Zulia, a rural area of western Venezuela. For nine days the oil showered onto the surrounding farmland, scaring the …

How a Pakistani Novelist and Translator Learned to Love Dictionaries

The Books He Once Saw as ‘Villainous’ and ‘Unwieldy’ Helped Him Introduce Children to Urdu Classical Literature

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi | July 25, 2018

An image from a winter morning in Hyderabad, Pakistan, when I was four, forms my earliest memory of literacy.

Bundled up in layers of sweaters, I am reciting from an …

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