By SUSAN BRINK Two young orphans inspired Dr. Benjamin Black to write a book about his experiences during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. The British obstetrician/gynecologist knew the two boys, aged 8 and 9, for less than a day. When he met them, one was barely able to sip some fluid; the other… Read More »A doctor’s Ebola memoir is all too timely with a new outbreak in Uganda
Interview by Spencer Quong May 21, 2019. Curated from The Paris Review. Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished… Read More »Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny Choi
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is set in 1989 – a significant year in Sri Lanka’s recent history. For those who aren’t very familiar with Sri Lanka’s civil war, could you give our readers a sense of what was happening at that time and why you chose that specific year as the backdrop for Maali’s… Read More »A Conversation with the 2022 Booker Prize Winner, Shehan Karunatilaka
The Spanish writer on how Papyrus, her bestselling history of literature in the ancient world, changed her life at a difficult moment, and why it’s a mistake to undervalue books Born in 1979, Irene Vallejo is a Spanish writer, historian and philologist, and a regular columnist in the newspaper El País. She had written several books,… Read More »Philologist IRENE VALLEJO: ‘Alexander the Great’s library was the first step towards the internet’