Author Description

Foreign features stories and poetry, from, about, or by people in Morocco, Buenos Aires, Russia, London, Italy, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Poland, Slovakia, Syria, Germany, India, Sweden, Afghanistan, Israel, Sri Lanka, Scotland, Korea, Iran, America and more. All of it is about life away from home, about intersecting cultures and languages, about life as an outsider, but also more universal themes of loss, seduction, absurdity, hilarity, and more. In much of it, there is a pervading sense of remorse over the passing of time, in how our decisions affect us through our lives, how we cannot wind back the dial. As Maryam Alihkani, one of our poets, says, "Before you know / you are homesick and longing for / a place you no longer belong..." In the spirit of Hemingway, Melville, Gilbert, Iyer, Theroux, Thoreau, Hunter S. Thompson, Cheryl Strayed, George Orwell, Graham Greene, David Mitchell, James Baldwin, Mohsin Hamid, Min Jin Lee, Malcolm Lowry, Paul Bowles, the Romantics, the Beats. These are not general travel stories, or helpful tips for backpacking through Bali, but tales of being human, of broken hearts, desire, fear, and laughter.