Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation.

I read Seamus Heaney’s North as a university student in 1997. At the time, there had been a number of failed ceasefires between the republican and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the Good Friday agreement was not yet in sight. In North, Heaney finds a way through sectarian violence in a stunning series of poems centered on Northern Europe’s bog bodies...

At his Basilica, the ivory horn
St. Francis used to call people to prayer
rather than dogs to hunt small creatures
hangs in a glass box, gift of a Muslim sultan,
a wooden cylinder later strung with chains
& used to beat disciples to attention.

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian, but, within a few short years...

We were sitting around the kitchen table in the Birkerts-Focht apartment on Magnolia Street in Cambridge, discussing the work of our contemporaries. Someone quoted Yeats: “I don’t know which of us will succeed, but one thing I know for certain: there are too many of us.” It was the eighties...

There are bats in the attic. From my office, where I spend most of my waking hours, I can hear them. They live just above my head. Chittering. A screech, a crinkle. I know the babies are up there, just above the far eastern corner of the ceiling, hairless and pink. And then one appeared dead on the...