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A former marine biologist, cook, speechwriter, and White House policy advisor, Michael Gruber is a New York Times–bestselling writer who work infuses genre fiction with philosophical and supernatural themes. His books include the Jimmy Paz trilogy (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones, and Night of the Jaguar) and thrillers about Shakespeare (The Book of Air…

Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 in Speedwell, a small Mennonite community in northern Saskatchewan. His parents had fled Russia in 1930 and became part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West. In 1947 Wiebe’s family moved to southern Alberta. Wiebe studied literature at the University of Alberta and the University…

Issue 89 features the work of graffiti and installation artist Mohammed Ali, whose murals appear in cities all over the world, from his native Birmingham to Melbourne, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur. He also performs collaboratively with musicians and poets. In the accompanying essay, George Dardess describes the way Ali sees his work as part of…

Charles Wright is the author of nearly thirty collections of poetry, most recently Sestets, Bye-and-Bye, and Caribou (all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as well as two books of criticism and a collection of translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa…

George Saunders is the author of four collections of short stories—Civilwarland in Bad Decline (1997), Pastoralia (2001), In Persuasion Nation (2007), and Tenth of December (2014)—as well as a book of essays, The Brain-Dead Megaphone (2007), and an award-winning children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2005). Civilwarland in Bad Decline was a finalist…

Khaled Mattawa on Adonis Our new issue includes Khaled Mattawa’s translation of “A Bridge to Job” by leading Syrian poet Adonis. We asked Mattawa to talk with us a little about Adonis’s work, the challenges of translation from Arabic, and what poetry in translation can uniquely offer us. This project is supported in part by…

In issue 87, poet Lisa Ampleman reviews three new books by Jericho Brown, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Rickey Laurentiis—three African American poets who each write about faith, identity, and injustice in different ways. We asked her to reflect a little on the connection between poetry, empathy, and justice. She was interviewed by Mary Kenagy Mitchell.…

Phil Klay was born in Westchester, New York, in 1983. He studied creative writing and literature at Dartmouth College and graduated in 2005. That spring he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps and in 2007 was deployed to Iraq during the troop surge. He served as a public affairs…

In Image issue 86, filmmaker Samuel Gray Anderson writes about darkly poetic rocker Nick Cave—and how a nice guy became a fan of such violent, discordant music. Image: You write that you sometimes describe the last decade of your life like this: ten years ago you were a U2 fan and now you’re a partisan…