Image: Scott Carney, "Bag full of human tibias found on the Indo-Bhutan border," 2007.
This month we're covering black markets: those underground exchanges of contraband that power parallel economies throughout the world. Goods both human and inanimate are traded in these shadowy venues, where everything from kidneys to diamonds is available, often at horrific cost. In fiction and essays, Wang Bang, Abdelilah Hamdouchi, Vladimir Lorchenkov, Jason Miklian, Dominique Manotti, Dmitri Novosolov, Edgard Telles Ribeiro, and Ye Yonglie explore clandestine systems around the world. And in the latest installment of our World through the Eyes of Writers feature, Poland's Paweł Huelle salutes poet Tomasz Różycki.
My Shadow Library: A Chinese Author on Book Piracy
To date, I have collected fifty-four titles supposedly written by me.
from “The Good Life Elsewhere”
As for the kidney, I’ll slip it in there myself.
“Let’s Deal”: A Conversation with a Diamond Smuggler
Retail customers rarely consider provenance an issue worthy of scrutiny before buying.
from “Za”
"They are saying that this man is a fridge full of organs!”
Free!
She’s too young, we can’t keep her.
Traders
The ex-con took him out to the platform of the car and with one deft movement . . .
Señor Capitán
The fishing boat could hold thirty passengers out on the deck.
bilingual
A Relentless War
They immediately request permission to take samples in order to trace the source of the drug.
Bled Dry
They were under arrest because they didn't have enough money to do business with the cops.
Book Reviews
Yu Xiang’s “I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust”
Reviewed by Naomi Long Eagleson
Yu Xiang’s poems are the poetic equivalent of shoegazer rock.