PN Review 283 (Pn Review)

The May-June 2025 issue.  Between Language is a special issue of PN Review. It grasps a creative nettle: ‘Many of us as writers and readers are differently, sometimes conflictedly, alive in a variety of languages. Alive even in dead languages, one might say, proving those languages anything but mortal.’ We invited poets, novelists, critics, philosophers and translators to explore the different ways in which languages communicate over time and between one another; what some can and others cannot express; how inferences (irony, for example) belonging to a class or a culture constrain expression. The political arguments, creative and formal challenges that emerge in these pages will refocus our ways of hearing and reading our languages, our individual and collective consciousness, how we can be cancelled or silenced and then find our way around silencing.