Writing
Essays
Words Without Borders
Roll Call of Abandoned Languages My language promiscuity and everything it says
The Thrill of Reading Obliviously Translations, comp titles, and reading Anne Frank
Electric Literature
What to Read…When You are Infatuated (Valentine’s Day reading of Leesa Cross-Smith, Alexander Chee, Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir’s letters!)
What to Read…When You Can’t Think About Anything about Anything but How the World Has Gone to Hell (Eduardo Galeano)
What to Read…When You Are Going Through a Friend Break-Up (Elena Ferrante)
Harper's Bazaar
Everything that's Important Personal essay on moving and shifting between minimalism and maximalism
Book Reviews
Southwest Review
Yuri Herrera's Season of the Swamp
New York Times Book Review
Interviews
Electric Literature
Justin Torres on Blackouts, his long-awaited (and sublime, tangential) sophomore novel, reading layers, and growing into a gay literary tío
Alejandro Zambra on what families are, fathers and sons, and literary pretensions in Chilean Poet (trans. by Megan McDowell)
Gabriela Wiener on her desire, polyamorous jealousy, and her decolonial fact-fiction remix Undiscovered (trans.by Julia Sanches)
Kristen Radtke on why Americans are so lonely in Seek You
Mariana Enriquez on The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (trans. by Megan McDowell), Instagram witches, the past’s horrors, and passing the blame for collective responsibility
Samanta Schweblin on screen intimacy, watching and being watched, and the genius of being old with technology in Little Eyes (trans. by Megan McDowell)
Marie-Helene Bertino on putting birds through a narrative prism and what being ambiguous and opaque to others means in America in Parakeet
Laura Van den Berg on dying and her 100-supplement-a-day grandmother, empire striking through the American tourist, the most “Florida” of stories, and the ultimate Karen of I Hold the Wolf by the Ears
Yu Miri on her personal (and political) history with the Olympics Games in Tokyo Ueno Station (trans. by Morgan Giles)
E.J. Koh on translation-poetry-memoir remix, living while excavating the troubled past(s), and writing difficult love letters in The Magical Language of Others
Jenny Offill is a climate change doomer in Weather
Mahir Guven on how Uber can go fuck itself, being French and being spoken of in the same breath as Michel Houellebecq upon his debut Older Brother (trans. by Tina Kover)
Sukutu Mehta’s immigration manifesto This Land is Our Land
Sandra Cisneros on books as medicine
Literary Translators Interviews
How They Became Literary Translators
Literary Translators You Should Read
More Literary Translators You Should Know
Literary Translators You Need to Know
For more interviews, see here.
Harper's Bazaar
In Between Dreams Akwaeke Emezi on their debut novel, Freshwater
Studio Cookups Malay Ho on being beat maker for Frank Ocean, John Legend, Sam Smith, Zayn Malik, and Alicia Keys
Reading Lists
Electric Literature
For Unmissable Translated Novels
For New Orleans Book Beyond Mardi Gras
For Mexico City books After Watching Netflix’s Roma
For Understanding of the U.S.-Mexico Border
From the Archive
In London and New York, I reported on fashion, art, culture, money, and people for style.com, Grazia, Forbes, Chicago Tribune and others. Below are highlights:
Style.com
For the original "fashion blog" of Vogue, I covered people and Fashion Weeks in London and NYC for the site. Especially exciting was chatting to Bill Clinton about sustenance, being blown away by Oprah's luminosity at the New York Public Library Lions gala, and hanging out at Marc Jacobs' holiday parties.
Harper's Bazaar
Fashion Week Revealed Republished by San Francisco Chronicle, the local newspaper of my favorite American city in which I've not yet lived