A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life, he’s taken American letters to uncharted realms.

America’s most fearless satirist has seen his wildest fictions become reality.

Viola Davis’s new feature is a rousing tribute to the world’s only all-female army. But how true is the story it tells?

Writing in Japanese and German, Tawada explores borderlands in which people and words have lost their moorings.

Plentiful new jobs at higher wages in places with cheaper housing sounds like a solution to inequality.

Her virtuosity won the instrument a place in jazz, but her achievements have long been overlooked.

The Dial is an online magazine of culture, politics, and ideas with a focus on locally sourced writing from around the world.

For generations, America’s major publishers focused almost entirely on white readers. Now a new cadre of executives like Lisa Lucas is trying to open up the industry.

The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist Kobena Mercer explore “primitive” sculpture and the queering of the New Negro.

In “Tremor,” Cole and his narrator grapple with a dilemma: Is there a way to represent the world without betraying it?

His runaway success began with castaway junk: a bag of bottle caps along the road. Now the Ghanaian sculptor is redefining Africa’s place in the global art scene.

After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls?

Maya Binyam’s sphinxlike début, about an exile returning home, punctures the demands we make of immigrants and their stories.

America’s most fearless satirist has seen his wildest fictions become reality.

A new book explores the first campaign to decolonize Europe’s museums—and exposes the conspiracy that smothered it.

This fall 500 Louisianans, in 19th-century attire, will re-create America’s largest plantation uprising in a provocative two-day performance-art piece staged by artist Dread Scott.

“Afro-Atlantic Histories,” now at the National Gallery of Art, offers an epic survey of the diaspora.

At sixty-one, the doyenne of African pop is recording with everyone from Burna Boy to Philip Glass—and still searching for new rhythms.

The parasites, hybrids, and vampires of her science fiction make the price of persisting viscerally real.

Four new literary works revisit African history, refiguring age-old maledictions as a birthright, a special form of insight, a superpower, a redemption. Julian Lucas explains.

In “How the Word Is Passed,” the poet and journalist Clint Smith visits nine places to assess how we are reckoning with our racial history and its legacy.

Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o travels to West Africa to learn about the female warriors known as the Agoji, whose rich culture and complex history is often misunderstood by outsiders.

The culture writer is a passionate gamer, with a particular interest in video games as a form of landscape art.

Princes shall come out of Egypt;Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God Psalm 68:31 Cowboy hat from GucciWrangler on my bootyCan’t nobody tell

Abdulrazak Gurnah vividly captures colonial and post-colonial histories of abuse and dispossession, but also startling acts of reclamation and renewal.

In Punks, the self is never static and cannot exist outside its relationships to others.

The “Mandalorian” and “Breaking Bad” villain credits his menacing poise to mindfulness and military school—and yearns to play an everyman.

The 2020 National Book Awards ceremony was presented at no cost, and supported by viewers like you.

The novelist Mathias Énard reimagines the Renaissance.

19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt’s subversive literature

Henry Dumas was just thirty-three when he was killed by a New York City police officer, but he’d already created entire worlds.

Ak Dan Gwang Chil · Album · 2020 · 9 songs.