In her new film, Songs From the North, Soon-Mi Yoo mines the land of memory, and the dormant conflicts and sorrows that bind the people of North and South Korea.

The Look of Silence, and the price of forgiveness.

“One is constantly working over what happened and constructing the future based on the past. So there’s no way of saying now we’re done with the past and it’s time to look for our future. No, there’s a direct continuity between these things.”

“The movement of the crowd edged towards the Avenue Mariscal Lopez where the processions wre passing” (Graham Greene, Travels with my Aunt, p. 217). 

Crazy people tend to have lots of talent. It must be a sort of compensation.

Francisco Goldman I imagine that we should begin with a few words about what is happening today in Guatemala. Hurricane Stan, the flooding, the terrible loss of lives, the general calamity that is going to sink people even deeper into lives of inescapable poverty. What did Guatemala do to deserve so much suffering?

I can’t remember where I first met Nuruddin Farah, but it was at some sort of conference. 

“I have never believed and have no faith in the intentions of a man who wants to make life better for all men. I think this just leads to concentration camps and Stalinist purges, the Inquisition and all of that horror. I believe that man is a species one should be very suspicious of.”

Claribel Alegría is one of the foremost poets of Central America. A supporter of the Sandinistas and mentor to the young intellectuals drawn to Managua during that period, she has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and testimony.

This is Colm Tóibín’s third novel, and a very fine piece of work it is too.

I’ve stood on thinner sheets. Took crunching walks

Griselda Gambaro talks to Marguerite Feitlowitz about the pressures of writing under an oppressive government regime in Argentina.

“Life here is surreal” writes science fiction author Angélica Gorodischer in a letter to Marguerite Feitlowitz. Here she discusses the writing life in a time and place where independent thinkers face the risk of anything from torture to death.

The Generals buy, interpret and dispense