What Rights does Nature have? with Sumana Roy
This year’s international literature festival Berlin has placed particular emphasis on alternative and sustainable economic forms. Poco.lit. visited an event presenting Sumana Roy’s contribution.
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Anna von Rath
diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.
Die Sommer
“Die Sommer” (“The Summers”) is an important book about the world’s dividedness, about religious and political conflicts, about prejudice and identity.
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Queer Afropolitanism in Germany: SchwarzRund
This essay is the last in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. SchwarzRund’s intervention in the Afropolitan literary market thus stands out not only because of the setting and language of the novel, but also because of its evidently intersectional approach.
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Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined
As I read the book, I had the feeling that its main target audience is young boys who struggle with the expectations of having to be tough guys. Bola mentions that he wrote “Mask Off” precisely because he himself would have wished for just this book in his youth.
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The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh’s novel asks a fundamental question: What is more worthy of protection, human life or the environment?
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The Grassling
In The Grassling, Burnett manages to write so elegantly and touchingly about nature, and what people can learn from it, that big issues suddenly feel more tangible.
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Afropolitanism as a dead-end road: Brian Chikwava
This essay is the third in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. Brian Chikwava has not written a theoretical treatise on Afropolitanism. But his novel Harare North has been much discussed in the context of Afropolitanism.
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Gegen Morgen
At first glance, Deniz Utlu’s novel Gegen Morgen (Against Tomorrow) could be read as the story of a man in his mid-thirties going through a midlife crisis. Only at second glance does it become clear that it is about the fundamental questioning of value systems.
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Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli teaches at Columbia University in New York, and works as a journalist in Mexico and the USA. She published her excellent novel Lost Children Archive in 2019. From the very first pages, I fell in love with the book: with Luiselli’s gentle narrative voice, and with the family’s soundscape, whom my reading allowed […]
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Palast der Miserablen
In early 2020, the German-Iraqi author Abbas Khider published his fifth novel, which is set in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime.
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