Literatur.Review - The literary magazine for the whole world

Life as an echo

Studio Q

Oyinkan Braithwaite

Oyinkan Braithwaite's "Cursed Daughters" tells of curse, memory and self-empowerment - between Lagos, family ghosts and the question of whether origin is destiny or just narrative

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Ramadan, then and now

Private

Sébastien in Kinda Village (2001)

A journey through memory and the city of Aden

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Crime fiction and multiculturalism

Studio Heno

Moritz Föllmer

A.A. Dhand and Saima Mir write crime novels set in Bradford, a former textile city with a large Muslim/British/Asian community. They address migration and protest, and challenge racist and sexist stereotypes.

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Apocalypse 2.0

Private

José Miguel Garcia León

Historical catastrophes beyond the present: intermittent plague, climate crises and geopolitical transformations from Justinian I to the Abbasid Caliphate

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“Zimbabwe is my muse”

Private

Cynthia Marangwanda

Mbizo Chirasha in conversation with Zimbabwean cultural activist, writer and performance poet Cynthia Marangwanda

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The West is dead. Long live the West?

Camilla Winter-Moore and Sukant Deepak

Georgios Varouxakis and Josephine Quinn

The West is booming. Many believe it is a dilapidated house that should finally be torn down. But what does it represent and how did it become what it is today? Two books provide the answers.

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The Situation

Private

Jakub Stachowiak

A short story from Iceland

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Behind the glasses

Private

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

Two short stories from Saudi Arabia

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Fragments of Hope in Failing Light

Private

Dunya Yousufzai

A memoir on education, interruption, and the remains of a female life in Afghanistan

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The mother of the house

Private

Urun Kuhzod

A story from Tajikistan

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Under the silence of gold

private

Mi Ravao

A short story from Madagascar

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Foreigners

Private

Al Joseph Lumen

Philippine stories from a German retirement home

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The Functionary’s Story

Raoni Maddalena

Leonardo Garzaro

A short story from Brazil

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Khemji

Franziska Willimann

Waseem Hussain

An Indian tragedy

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A street through a wall

Private

Ali Al Hazmi

Five poems from Saudi Arabia

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"Life is already difficult enough"

Axel Timo Purr

Ahmed Abdel Moneim Ramadan

Egyptian author Ahmed Abdel Moneim Ramadan on how absurdity and fantasy mirror Egypt’s social and political realities, shifts in the literary landscape, the economics of writing, and the tension between profession and art.

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Where decisions speak softly

Mary Ellen Matthews / Suhrkamp

"Into the Uncut Grass": Trevor Noah and Sabina Hahn tell why sometimes you just have to start running to get home. A fable about friendship, freedom and the gentle weight of decisions

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On the present state of Moroccan literature

Private

Mohamed Khalfouf

On canon formation, linguistic diversity and literature beyond the centre

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"Hitler was a leftist"

Maximilian Gödecke

Volker Weiß

In "Das Deutsche Demokratische Reich" (The German Democratic Reich), historian Volker Weiß shows how right-wing politics is made possible today by the rewriting and reinterpreting of history

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Against "colonial amnesia"

Sonja Maria Schobinger

Martin R. Dean

In his transcontinental family history "Tabak und Schokolade", Martin R. Dean reconstructs Switzerland's colonial entanglements using a wide variety of memory media

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Bound to be Re-Read?

KAG1LP2MDIAKITE, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Yambo Ouologuem

‚Bound to Violence‘ by Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, a series of books self-defined as “shaping the reading habits of generations since 1961”