Mandana Chaffa

Chicago

Founder/ Editor-in-Chief at Nowruz Journal

Editor-at-Large at Chicago Review of Books

Founder/EiC @NowruzJournal •Editor-at-Large @chicagorevbooks •VP/Barrios Book in Translation Prize @bookcritics •BoardPresident @flowchartfdn زنان. زندگی. آزادی

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Articles

“The Persians” Asks Who We Might Become When We Choose to Immigrate or Not

4 weeks ago | electricliterature.com | Mandana Chaffa

Skip to content interviews Sanam Mahloudji’s debut novel tells a ranging, multigenerational story of those who leave and those who stay in post-Revolution Iran Born in another country and a citizen of this one, I’ve always thought that there’s a distinction to be made regarding how and when and why one immigrates—or doesn’t. To leave, to stay: who do we become? What part of ourselves might we lose? Are we running from or running toward? The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji’s crackling and confident...
The Paradox of Existence and Extinction: An Interview with Mai Der Vang on “Primordial”

1 month ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Mandana Chaffa

“Absence • behind me, • absence in • front of me • forever reaching at • a ghost.”Primordial, the rich and rewarding new collection by Mai Der Vang, is deeply engaged with the absence—and presence—of a genus, a people, a language, and life itself. By focusing on Saola, a spindle-horned, critically-endangered, and rarely-witnessed mammal, Vang explores the fate of the genus with that of Hmong people, each impacted by generational and environmental violence, and reclaims their agency.
Unconscious Spells: On Mansoura Ez Eldin’s The Orchards of Basra

2 months ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Alex Tan |Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey

A chronicler of the chimeric, the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez Eldin has been celebrated in the Arab world for her feverish, fanciful plots. To read her feels like opening one’s eyes into a fugue state, a landscape in which the parameters of reality seem just slightly off-kilter. The air, in her universe, is always abuzz with ethereal presences and diaphanous bodies, anticipating the propitious moment for revelation.
The Watchlist: March 2025

2 months ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu

From Schaffner Press | The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French by Ryan Chamberlain | Fiction | 240 pages | ISBN 9781639640591 | US$17.95 What the publisher says: “In this gripping novel set in both French Guinea and Paris, award-winning author (The King of Kahel) Tierno Monénembo explores themes of international exile, sexual abuse, generational trauma, and repressed memory of a people and country under the regime of dictator Sekou Toure from...
The National Book Critics Circle Appreciations for the 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

Mar 12, 2025 | wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu

Now in its third year, the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize celebrates a thrilling span of books, across genres, languages, countries of origin, and publishers. During the course of 2024, our panel—a combination of member critics and several board members—deliberated over hundreds of books, resulting in the following shortlist. It’s an honor to present our judges’ appreciations for our six finalists.
"Tell The Truth, Shame The Devil": Eve L. Ewing on "Original Sins"

Mar 3, 2025 | chireviewofbooks.com | Mandana Chaffa

Even in an era of multi-hyphenates, Chicago-native Dr. Eve L. Ewing’s achievements are exemplary: scholar, educator, cultural organizer, poet, playwright and comic book author to name a few. Her newest project is equally striking. Original Sins: The (Mis)Education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, is a critical investigation of the ways the U.S. school system engenders racial inequality and social hierarchies.
A Small Extinction: Part 1

Jan 28, 2025 | wordswithoutborders.org | Bora Chung |Mandana Chaffa |Elete Nelson-Fearon

When her little sister said she was going to become a machine, Sang was against it. This was around the time when the new billionaire fad was sending manned and unmanned spacecraft into space for fun, and the news was reporting on the possible discovery of life on other planets. The billionaires’ companies that had made them billionaires were all preparing for a transhuman era where people could exist beyond space, and were advertising the fact.
“Making Space for Each Other”: Anton Hur on Toward Eternity, Translation, and Immortality

Jan 27, 2025 | wordswithoutborders.org | Mandana Chaffa |Bora Chung |Kyung-sook Shin |Elete Nelson-Fearon

Award-winning translator Anton Hur can add another achievement to his vita: successful novelist. Toward Eternity is an ambitious, rewarding, and dazzling meditation on the intersections of biology and technology, mortality and eternity, and collective and individual memory, as well as the meaning and necessity of art, and love.
“Come Shelter Me in This Distant Country”: Homelands in Selim Temo’s Nightlands

Nov 14, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Mandana Chaffa |Tobias Carroll

With members across Kurdistan, the United States, Andalusia, Sweden, Turkey, and Palestine, the collective Pinsapo creates and publicizes “homeless poetry and art works.” The press has launched their Kurdish Poetry Series with a bilingual edition of Selim Temo’s Nightlands, sensitively translated from the Kurmanji by Zêdan Xelef and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and edited by Öykü Tekten. It’s a noteworthy introduction to a vital series.
The Precious Finds of Idra Novey's "Soon and Wholly"

Sep 17, 2024 | chireviewofbooks.com | Mandana Chaffa

Translation is inherently a poetic act, a submersion in sound, the word and multiplicities of meaning, and it’s wholly a delight that translator and novelist Idra Novey has published a new poetry collection, a dozen years after Exit, Civilian: Poems. Translators give us a world otherwise lost to us, unless we speak the original language. So do our poets.