Breytenbach is a South African poet, novelist,  and human rights activist who spent seven years in jail for fighting apartheid.The selections in Guernica—which read like flash fiction, but are a part of a novel—are astoundingly beautiful, but searing, too. I think it’s some of the best stuff I’ve ever edited. He also provided the illustration.

Here are the first few lines:

It was the evening before Xmas. White. Even the beards of trees were white. Wind walks sniffing over the snow. A thin wind. The trees shake their frozen arms the snow falls ploof in the snow. A rind of ice covers the Danube. Continue reading →

Poet Tomas Tranströmer has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

We’ve published him. Twice.

I spoke with Craig Thompson for Guernica, and I asked him about his new graphic novel, Habibi, and why he chose to set it in the Middle East.

I didn’t mention it in the piece, but during the interview, I was inundated by the sounds of an ice cream truck right outside my door. “Sounds like a circus!” Thompson said. It kind of was.

Here’s how the interview is described in the deck for the piece:

“The author of the lauded graphic novel Blankets discusses the influences behind his new book, the effect of 9/11 on his work, and the decline of the superhero in comics.”

We also ran an eleven-page except from Habibi. 

You probably had to read him in college—Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart.

I certainly did and I remember not looking forward to it. I didn’t like the book cover, which was a confusion of yellows, browns, and burnt orange. It was exhausting just to read the title. Yes, I judged a book by its cover.

I was also lazy: I didn’t want to read yet another assigned book. I grumbled and moaned and put off reading it.

But I loved it.

In fact, it blew me away.

I’m so proud that he’s now in Guernica. How did we get him? Because at Guernica, we often feature African writing. We’ve won awards for it. And why? Because we came to love African writing through Achebe.