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I first found Abdul’s name on African Writing, I think. I was then searching for writers to include in this project, writers who were, should I say, ‘within reach.’ Indeed, Abdul was. This conversation demonstrates, in an interesting way, how his creativity seems bared, in an open-ended way, so that it seems possible to discover the extent of his nuances.

One popular way for developing nations to announce to the world that they have made it onto the global stage in the early 21st century is to host a major international sporting event: From China's Beijing Olympics in 2008, to Russia's upcoming Winter Games in 2014, South Africa's World Cup stewardship in 2010 and Brazil's double coup of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics; staging a spectacle of this magnitude is a clear signal to the world that you are now a country of note.  This was certainly the motivation for Poland and Ukraine's joint bid to host the Euro 2012 soccer championships this month.  But the event that was suppose to b

In yet another stellar issue of World Literature Today (May/June 2012), the dastardly practice of censorship of literature and writers in general was given due attention. In his informative piece on censorship in Iran, Blake Atwood ends his piece with the following commentary:

It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in creative writing classes) that a writer in search of a good story must first invent a lifelike, interesting character. The commonly held wisdom is that once such a character has been imagined, the story then shapes itself, dependent on the character’s desires and decisions.

It is best that Richard speaks for himself, that I present this conversation without remarks. For suddenly, in need of an introductory note, I find that I have none, and that Richard’s responses sparks of completeness. In fact, I had no reason to respond to his first responses – perhaps silenced by the lengthiness and profundity of each response. And knowing Richard, knowing him as the Chief Operating Officer of Parresia, publishers of my first book, and having met him only once, yet feeling that I have known him for a much longer time, I daresay that I expected to be knocked down by the weight and compulsiveness of his erudition.

In the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the Lebanese hastened to escape the burden of the recent past, either erasing the memory of the war or longing for the re-establishment of life as it was before the war.

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"Are things still good there?” a man asks. “At least they are better than here,” Eraldo responds as he prepares for his third venture to the United States. Eraldo Pacheco, a Chilean shepherd, is starting a contract to work as a sheepherder in the plains of Idaho for the next three years.