Arts & Culture

Europe and the Ottoman Empire through three 17th-century writers Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in […]

During a lonely and difficult year, author Jason Schwartzman began allowing regular, everyday interactions with strangers to escalate. In this book, Schwartzman compiles dozens of these encounters and deftly reveals the kinship he finds there, ultimately reconsidering what it means to know someone.

Alluring, nurturing, dangerous, and vulnerable the yamamba, or Japanese mountain witch, has intrigued audiences for centuries. What is it about the fusion of mountains with the solitary old woman that produces such an enigmatic figure? And why does she still call to us in this modern, scientific era? Co-editors Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich […]

“I jostled her shoulder and noticed when I did that her skin was cold to the touch….her entire torso was covered in tattoos from her collar bone to the midline of her thighs. All were of kimono motifs—fans, incense burners, peonies, and scrolls.”  This ghastly scene was the last thing Ruth Bennett expected to encounter […]

In hybrid narrative prose poems, “In the Antarctic Circle” follows two characters as they weave a life among the frigid, white landscape of the southern continent.