A Year in Reading: Madeleine Schwartz

At the beginning of this year I started a new magazine, , which it turns out is a bit like hosting a continuous dinner party in your brain. Some of the best things that I read this year were pieces of writing we edited, translated, or excerpted: ’s of loss and longing, ’s illustrated of the 2020 Beirut explosion, ’s ’s elegant architecture , fiction by and , and amazing journalism from , , and elsewhere. It has been particularly wonderful to be publishing literature and reporting in translation and bilingually; I loved working with the translator to publish poems by in English and Chinese, and with to translate from . On our About page, which we wrote before launching, my colleagues and I talked about the need “to write the present in order to create a future.” This is a goal I’ve turned to over since January.