Karen Swenson

Karen Swenson has published five volumes of poetry, been included in numerous anthologies, and appeared in The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Poetry, Commonweal, Miramar, The Nation, and other publications. Also the author of travel and political articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Swenson presently lives in Barcelona, Spain.

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The Spanish Civil War: Harbinger of World War II (on Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939; Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, revised and expanded edition, and We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War; Henry Buckley’s The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic: A Witness to the Spanish Civil War; Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Civil War; Nick Lloyd’s Forgotten Places: Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War; ¡No Pasarán!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War, edited by Pete Ayrton; George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; Enrique Moradiellos’s Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator; Mercè Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square, translated by Peter Bush; Emili Teixidor’s Black Bread, translated by Peter Bush; Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain, translated by Ben Faccini; and Manuel Rivas’s The Low Voices, translated by Jonathan Dunne)

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In Another Country (on The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub; Hotel Kid: A Times Square Childhood by Stephen Lewis; All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s by Daniel Kane; Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918 by Gerald W. McFarland; Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York by Paul Goldberger; & Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Philip Lopate)

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Tibet: A Reading List (on Xinran’s Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet; Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue; Tubten Khétsun’s Memories of Life in Lhasa under Chinese Rule; Anne Carolyn Klein’s Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self; Hildegard Diemberger’s When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet; Vic Mansfield’s Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics: Toward a Union of Love and Knowledge; Melvyn C. Goldstein’s A History of Modern Tibet, Vol. 2: The Calm Before the Storm, 1951–1955; Matthew T. Kapstein’s The Tibetans; Manosi Lahiri’s Here Be Yaks: Travels in Far Western Tibet; Patrick French’s Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land; Robert Barnett’s Lhasa: Streets with Memories; and Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s 100 Questions, edited by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille)