We start the year confronting — and confronted by — the centripetal power of whiteness. Youssef Rakha, a novelist who was born and lives in Egypt, recounts a lifelong journey to forge the “new, contemporary ore” of culture in the aftermath of…

In our last issue of the year, we share work that explores a moment of change — an often unarticulated, sometimes unnoticed moment where our worlds, individual and collective, seem to cleave. To do so, April Zhu and Theo Aalders must complicate…

When the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began, Faisal Saleh reached out to US museums, interested in whether they would make statements in solidarity with artists from Gaza. “The museums told me they focus on programming,” Saleh told me by telephone.…

You needn’t read very far to find the theme of A Nearby Country Called Love — or one of them, at least. Salar Abdoh’s latest novel tips its hand almost immediately. A man named Nasser claims a distant kinship to a woman who set herself on fire after…

Recently, I came across a new book that collects and translates hundreds of Kirundi proverbs. It’s the work of Lionel Kubwimana, and it brings treasures from the language of Burundi to speakers of English and French — and to speakers of Kirundi…

Alexander Chee’s essay, taken from a new edition of Dracula in bookstores this week, takes the myth and the monster more seriously than, surely, many of us have. Among his considerations, he writes, were “the many ways we can write about evil, as it…

There is something, this month, about beginnings. So often, they act like flirtations — sometimes aggressive, other times coy, always with an agenda. Stay with me, they insist, at varying decibels. In this issue of Guernica, the beginnings are not…

In this short interview with Guernica editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, developed for the Guernica newsletter, translator Jack Jung talks about discovering the work of the poet Kim Hyesoon, translating her “non-poems” from Korean, and how readers…

We’re absolutely thrilled, in this new issue of Guernica, to showcase the work of Kim Hyesoon, a singular feminist South Korean poet; the translations by Don Mee Choi and Jack Jung; and the art of Fi Jae Lee. In fact, “showcase” feels like too weak a…

This month, Guernica looks at what we want — who we want — and how on earth, or anywhere else, we can possibly survive our own wanting. We lead our June issue with a diptych on desire and the divine. MM Gindi and Enzo Escober, coming of age as queer…

Guernica, I often tell people, grew up with the Internet. We’ve been an online magazine since 2004, and we’ve seen online conversation grow and change a lot in those nineteen years. We’ve changed too — adding, some years back, a daily blog, then…

In early April 1994, when the genocide began in Rwanda, the meetings started in Washington. “They couldn’t say we were not going to do anything, because that’s bad policy,” recalled Prudence Bushnell, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for…

Our cultural script on pregnancy insists on certainty. Whether the authorities are doctors or majority-male legislatures, we are assured that humans know — that we know how to know — what pregnant people should eat, whether growing babies are getting…

You don’t have to read much beyond the headlines from Ukraine to know how this story goes: There are bad guys, stooges of a dictator, and good guys, fighting for freedom. The good guys are the underdogs, which is great for the narrative. But the…

In early March, Ingrid Gercama left her home in the Netherlands and flew to war-torn South Sudan. An applied-research anthropologist with a special interest in epidemics, she had spent time on the African continent during a public-health emergency…

Holly Pickett/Redux, for Rest of World Abdelazim Hassan is not tall. His voice does not boom. He is balding, wears glasses, and his suit, the dark brown of a standard boardroom table, hangs from his body as if it has given up. He’s mostly a corporate…

Holly Pickett/Redux, for Rest of World عبد العظيم حَسن ليس طويل القامة. صوته خافت. يتساقط شعره في طريقه نحو الصلع ويرتدي النظّارات، أمّا بِذلته فلونها بنّي داكن يُشبه لون طاولة اجتماعات تقليدية، تتدلى من على جسدهِ كما لو أنها قد استسلمت. يعمل عبد…

In July, 1993, an eleven-year-old named Damas Dukundane got a new pair of shoes. His mother bought them, unused, and paired them with a new blue suit. She was not terribly religious, and her son’s baptism would be the only time in her life that she…

It took the woman one agonizing month to decide to report that she had been sexually assaulted by a colleague from the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, while working in Ethiopia. It took the agency a week to investigate, concluding in a…

BUJUMBURA, Burundi — Burundi’s voters approved a new Constitution that extends the presidential term from five to seven years, according to provisional figures released on Friday, handing a major victory to President Pierre Nkurunziza. Mr.…