MR Notes

Je suis arrivée à Boston la veille du marathon. Le lendemain, tous les médias résonnaient du bruit des attentats. Moi qui viens de la région la plus pacifique du monde, la Suisse, j’ai été frappée par la façon professionnelle et émotionnelle dont ces événements ont été traités. Professionnelles parce que l’analyse de mauvaises images a permis en quelques heures de diffuser des photos de suspects immédiatement connues du monde entier. Emotionnelle parce que la matraquage médiatique continuel, obsessionnel, produit une impression bizarre sur l’étranger : cet événement est-il à ce point le cœur du monde ? Si important qu’il doit occulter absolument toute autre tragédie, même un terrible et violent tremblement de terre, même une guerre infernale, des événements qui produisent mille fois plus de victimes humaines dans un autre coin du monde? Vu par l’étranger, ce qui se passe aux Etats-Unis, cette espèce de provincialisme nombriliste de l’...

Chechnya is like a small Afghanistan, occupied and brutalized by the Russians for almost 200 years. The Chechens, and their neighbors, fought back with all the means at their disposal against an invader that outnumbered and outgunned them. The Chechens resorted to ambush, hit-and-run and other guerilla tactics. The most recent spike in violence was during the post-Soviet Russian-Chechen Wars, first in 1994-96 and again 1999-2000. The aftermath lingers, if we can judge by the Moscow subway bombing of 2010. The Chechens are angry and the Russians are their target.

Chechnya is a region in the Caucasus Mountains that form the southern border of the Russian Republic. The entire range stretches between Black and Caspian Seas, north of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Russia took this land in an early nineteenth-century war against Iran, securing the South Caucasus region (“Transcaucasia” to the Russians) while remaining unable to “pacify” the mountains until the...

How did I become a superhero?

As a child in Mexico City, I devoured comic strips of all types. At first they were American imports like Batman, Spiderman, and The Avengers. What I most liked about them was the dual identity, say between Clark Kent and his alter ego. Then I found the native counterparts, such as Kalimán, superheroes autochthonous to Latin American. It was then, I realized, that I’d found my passion. What I liked about these was their dedication to put order in a world like mine, which seemed defined by chaos.

            From comic strips I graduated to detective novels. I loved the armchair type: educated, unapologetically snobbish. Again, I...

You won't be surprised to hear that I get questioned, from time to time, about what sort of work MR prefers to publish. Generally the query comes from folks who know we're a literary quarterly and don't have to told what one is. Come to think of it, perhaps you yourself have asked me this question already, or soon will, standing in front of our table at the annual AWP pilgrimage. If so, you probably got my stock answer—that we're more interested in the world than the self.

I don't, at least entirely, mean this capsule comment to be a salvo against the onward-marching forests of memoir. To my mind, it just seems the quickest, and a relatively fair, summary of what this magazine has meant, and done, over its over half-century. Rather than the solipsistic self-world, we’ve been interested in capturing collectivities, and collective action; we see literature as a means of intervening in, experimenting on, and expanding the world, not just...