EMINE SEVGI ÖZDAMAR
The man started talking in Turkish, ‘Mari doesn’t live in Paris anymore.’ ‘Oh, oh!’ ‘She met someone two months ago and left for Canada with him. I live here now.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘she was my best friend in Istanbul. Oh, dear, have I come too late, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh?’ Then I went silent.

LOUIS-PHILIPPE DALEMBERT 
Every time I visit Cayenne, as soon as night falls, my feet always take me, almost against my will, back to la Crique. This notorious neighborhood of the Guianese capital was once known as the “Chinese Quarter,” but there’s nothing Asian about it anymore, or very little.

JEFFREY HARRISON
I often thought of Teeny and Aggie during this project. Though I never attended a séance to make contact with them, I did have a dream in which I found a letter Teeny had written to Marcel after his death, but I couldn’t remember what it said when I woke up.

SULAIMAN AL-SHATTI 
Whenever she spoke, my mother habitually turned down her upper lip and clenched her teeth as if to control the flow of her words—filtering them, if you will. Her teeth were white and strong; they were free of blemishes, except for the three that had been chipped.

ROMANA CAPEK-HABEKOVIC
A couple of days ago my husband returned from the grocery store with a pound of bananas and a small coconut. The bananas were perfectly ripe for consumption, and I put them in a fruit basket.

MEERA NAIR
I imagine the tree’s hanging roots and its giant trunk as conduits, which, along with its rising sap and the susurration of its leaves, convey the deepest longings and the secret stories of its devotees, all that clamorous human need, up to the silent gods hoping they are out there.

GERARDO SÁMANO CÓRDOVA
We called him Ísjaki. Few knew his real name. I certainly didn’t when I was charged with being his caretaker during his first visit to New York. Ísjaki meant “iceberg” in Iceland, where this man came from. I wrote Ísjaki on a blank sheet of paper—careful to include the accent.

TERESE SVOBODA
Eleanor Wilner, a recipient of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry and MacArthur-winner, had to be coaxed to publish her first collection at age 42.

MÓNICA GOMERY
I’m a person who’s generally in love with the world, but it’s a complicated love, best embodied by the Hebrew word yirah, meaning both awe and fear. The two work in tandem—it’s the feeling of being filled to the brim with both wonder and heartbreak.

FERDINAND SCHMALZ
He, Franz Schlicht, considers his innermost self, his fundamental constitution, as that of what they call a bad character. Albeit he sees this as something he became. To put it precisely, he thinks of his own fate as having started out from one moment.