Maria Eliades

In the following essay, “Istanbul Is a Moveable Feast,” Maria Eliades describes the development of her writerly imagination as one intricately tied to the cities and landscapes that shaped her personal identity. A Greek American with roots not only in Greece but also across Anatolia, Eliades traces her physical and intellectual journeys from a Greek nationalist community in the United States to her repatriation in cosmopolitan Istanbul—the birthplace of her father—and her travels to Thessaloniki, where her grandmother once carried water from a well.

The night of the 2016 presidential election, I clutch the neck of a beer bottle. It’s nine p.m., and the results are trickling onscreen. I got up at five in the morning to work at one of the polling stations in my hometown, and I’ve been cut off from the news and anything outside our room in the town library all day. On the couch in my family’s living room, I’m surrounded by my sister’s friends, all of them theatre kids in their mid-twenties. They’re starting to get agitated and upset at the ...

“Boys will be boys will be boys,” goes the chant in the now infamous Gilette commercial, which was intended as a supportive reaction to the #MeToo movement, looking to bring the behaviors and attitudes of toxic masculinity to the fore. While its message—that men are responsible for “challenging [themselves] to do more,” like intervening on behalf of women and children, in order to “get closer to [their] best”—and delivery received considerable pushback, guidelines issued by the American Psych...

Christos Ikonomou has been called a prophet of the Greek debt crisis—his short story collection Something Will Happen, You’ll See, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich in 2016, was published in March of 2010, weeks before Greek bonds were downgraded by credit rating agencies. His characters are dealing with the crisis in one way or another, regardless of whether they have named it. But the writer says he wasn’t a prophet—when he started writing his first collection, in 2003 and 2004, h...

After two weeks of illness, William (“Willie”) Lincoln, the third son of Abraham and Mary Todd, died on Thursday, February 20, 1862. In George Saunders’ historical novel Lincoln in the Bardo, he dies the morning after a highly criticized party his parents threw at the start of the Civil War, heightening the narrative tension and the guilt the Lincolns might have felt as their son grew sicker. We are told that while “the rich notes of the Marine Band in the apartments below came to the sick-ro...

The seminarians were frustrated, our Ancient Greek professor told us, that there wasn’t just one meaning to a word in Koine Greek. They were insistent in finding one, he said. But there’s no such thing as the best translation. There’s only a better one.
The idea certainly made sense to me. I’d grown up with liturgy books that had Koine Greek on the left side and English on the other. I had noticed that from church to church, the English changed, while the Greek did not. I heard it that way, t...

“Weak expression Poor artistry” reads the fictional note in red pencil on Constantine Cavafy’s sheaf of poems sent to the poet Jean Moréas in the novel, What’s Left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos and translated by Karen Emmerich. The line haunts Cavafy in the last three days of a stop in Paris with his brother John in 1897 at the end of what seems to be a European tour.

Asking to whom a country belongs, let alone considering whether the descendants of former colonists have a right to call a former colony home, feels profane. Yet, to not acknowledge the memories of groups like the pieds-noirs in Algeria is an act of erasure–albeit one that swims through the murky waters of colonial history.

Silence is a characteristic that is often expected of women. It makes women into whatever someone else wants them to be—a particular kind of pliability that is often required of women who wish to survive. Lilliet Berne, the orphan turned courtesan turned opera star living in late nineteenth century France, who serves as the protagonist of Alexander Chee’s novel The Queen of the Night, embodies the complicated interchange of power and weakness that accompanies silent women...

In his time, Stefan Zweig was one of the most prolific and popular writers in not only his home country of Austria, but also much of Europe, with his novels, plays, poems, and biographies ultimately translated into thirty-six languages; he was envied by many of his contemporaries. By 1933, however, at the apex of Adolf Hitler’s rise, Zweig’s books were so popular as to be banned and burned, and this persecution led to Zweig’s decision to quickly leave Austria...

In Stallings’ new collection of poetry, women are immersed in what it means to be a mother, and to see oneself growing older.

Michel Houellebecq has always been a provocative writer and in fact considers himself to be a real provocateur, someone who “says things he doesn’t think, just to shock,” and who leans into that shock when he has a sense that people will hate it.

Writing well is a task for the brave and the foolhardy, especially in the digital age. Writing well is to dare to make mistakes, to expose oneself, and to take the chance that everything might not be right or perfect.