Southwest Festival of the Written Word: The Best Books we Read in 2018

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt looks at Shakespeare’s power wielders – King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, etc. – and shows that the days of psychotic strongmen ruling their nations is nothing new. For a brilliant dissection of how the west has ransacked Africa, look no further than Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism,…

Our Concentration Camps: An Open Letter in the New York Review of Books

To the Editors: In Tornillo, Texas, in rows of pale yellow tents, some 1,600 children who were forcefully taken from their families sleep in lined-up bunks, boys separated from the girls. The children, who are between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, have limited access to legal services. They are not schooled. They are given…

Egypt’s Prophet: The Great Naguib Mahfouz

When I was 22, I went to live in Egypt for 18 months. I barely knew anything about the country but I did know about Naguib Mahfouz. Just four years earlier, he’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and my mother had so loved his work that she wrote to him via his publisher. To…