A shepherd boy alone in a field of thorns encounters a predator who systematically dismantles his physical autonomy.

Minnesota landscapes and the artifacts of modern travel document a search for political meaning and personal endurance amid decay.

A childhood photograph of a mother squinting at the sun becomes a focal point for reconciling intergenerational trauma and hidden family histories.

‘To make sure she was looking her best in the photos, Wu Jiayu avoided eating during our dates, and she didn’t order anything for me when we were done.’ A short story by Wang Zhanhei, translated by Dave Haysom.

An eleven-year-old girl leads a neighborhood gang in a suburban turf war against rival children on a local golf course.

A neighbor and his pug transform into actors on a shifting street corner seen through a window pane.

‘The word I used – janamdin, not saalgira – gave me away as someone who could only have grown up in India.’ Aatish Taseer on Urdu, Hindi and the cultural intricacies of sister languages.

A set of film shoot memories merges with ancestral trauma while a director demands authenticity from his weary actors.

A series of macabre images and historical executions become a canvas for childhood memories and formal artistic investigations.

Women gather at gravesides and protests to reclaim bodies from cycles of state violence and pervasive patriarchal brutality.

A painted shadow persists on a wall after a figure departs, questioning the finality of leaving and staying.

After her grandmother dies and her mother puts herself up for adoption, a young woman fields calls from strangers while reckoning with a childhood of suffocating love.

Peter Sellars brings human vulnerability to the Berlin Philharmonic through a spare, minimalist staging of the St. Matthew Passion.

A South African photographer uses staged imagery to document the unacknowledged identities and histories of life in Soweto.

‘A cold star breeze, you pass through my eyelashes.’ A poem by Ekhmetjan Osman translated by Joshua L. Freeman.

Dr. Emil Mayer’s photographs of 1910 Vienna reveal a cozy, idiosyncratic urban world that hides a more complex reality.

A speaker navigates the physical residues of internalized shame while the ocean offers a cold, salt-water perspective on survival.

A writer returns to a dusty house in Gerona to confront a peculiar, sensory isolation after months of work.

A stowaway land snail and a bed strewn with half-read books suggest the sluggish, delicate edges of domestic displacement.

‘That shiny / black tooth exuding the indisputable / urgency of the bite’ Four poems by Hu Xudong, translated by Margaret Ross.

Israeli military doctrine mandates the wholesale destruction of Lebanese infrastructure, reducing diverse civilian neighborhoods to mere targets of collateral slaughter.

A traveler in Trieste wanders through bookstores and libraries before locating an elderly woman in a quiet, hillside hospital.

A wooden sculpture of a hunchbacked dignitary forces an admission of physical vulnerability despite a lifetime of achieved prestige.

A writer traces her grandmother's legacy through the pages of a 1968 magazine and memories of a childhood home.

Neighbors in a diverse Seattle zip code navigate the precarious displacement of homes, belongings, and the familiar ache of exile.

‘Here we go, he thought. Time to be the son and heir, the head of the estate, the gatekeeper of the flame, the flamekeeper of the gate, the standard-bearer of the Jesus Christ enough already.’ Fiction by Joshua Cohen.

A granite boulder slips from a mythic figure's grasp to leave him resting in the tall, forgotten grass.

A college student navigates the bruising labor of industrial construction while reckoning with his estranged father's presence at the jobsite.

Sweating cake wedges, locker room rituals, and the visceral residue of past lovers map the contours of a restless body.

A man seeks intimacy in the dark corners of a porno theater while reflecting on his father's cruelty and lost connections.

A persistent archive of VHS tapes, pop culture, and past lovers reconstructs the specific textures of a coming-of-age life.

Coleman Hawkins elevates the tenor saxophone from a circus curiosity into a definitive jazz voice through his enduring recordings.

A seaside widow and the ghost of a sea captain engage in a slow, spectral romance across decades of time.

Tippy-toes and tea-steeping rituals chart the heavy, frightened geometry of human connection across various landscapes of modern violence.

Two interdisciplinary artists consider the gig economy, the performative constraints of the white cube, and the necessity of artistic promiscuity.

‘A cup is an open mouth / You kiss each day’ Three poems by Huang Fan, translated by Margaret Ross.

Two trans women move in together, navigating the complex interplay of polyamory, dating app culture, and queer intimacy.

A panicked mother begins a desperate, solitary search for her eighteen-year-old daughter after a cryptic, interrupted phone call late night.

‘There is something tantalising about the possibility of psychotherapy reshaping the Chinese psyche.’ Zhang Yueran on therapy in China.

A lifelong preoccupation with revenge fantasies provides the fuel and driving urgency for a writer's early creative ambition.

Wordplay deconstructs the rigid boundaries of language, turning the sound of a home generator into a site of transformation.

‘I sometimes reflect bitterly on friends that I have lost. In some cases, I broke things off with them, and in others we drifted apart.’