Transition 102

Transition may take a while to arrive in your mailbox, but it’s worth the wait.

A little over a year ago I blogged about the landmark 100th issue for Words Without Borders.

Now issue 102 is out. It’s dated 2009, and the full-page ad asking readers to mark their calendars for the 18th Pan African Film and Arts Festival on February 10 to 15 is not much use.

Still, where else can you find a table of contents like this? Issue 102 features a thoughtful interview with actor Harry Lennix (obviously written rather than spoken) in which he talks about the experience of working with August Wilson on plays like Radio Golf, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

There’s a collaborative collage of prose, photographs, and drawings about life in Kinshasa after dark, and about the homeless boys who live in the Kitambo cemetery. There’s a self-revealing piece by Lowell Brower, who was welcomed as he recorded folk tales in Zanzibar and elsewhere in Tanzania—until he reached the isolated island of Kojoani. And there’s a short story by Matthew Quinn Martin, about a break dancer who performs in the New York City subways, that comes to a jaw-dropping conclusion.

You may not enjoy everything here—the piece on East African literature was interesting to me, but would generally appeal to specialists—but if you’re interested in African (and world) culture you’re bound to like a lot.

Subscriptions to Transition are $36 a year (for print only)—a lot of money if you think of it as three magazines, but not much if you think of it as three edgy, surprising anthologies.