Image: STRINGER Mexico / Reuters, A soldier stands guard inside a storage room at a clandestine drug processing laboratory in Tlajomulco de Zuniga

What is it like to grow up in a country where the only safe place you can gather with friends is in your own home? How do you raise a family when going to the supermarket is fraught with the danger of being kidnapped? This is the situation in Mexico, where the drug wars have transformed the country into a living hell. Guest editor Carmen Boullosa has assembled compelling essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry from Mexican writers on the impact of this bloody conflict. In their eyewitness reports, Luis Felipe Fabre, Rafael Perez Gay, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Lemus, Fabrizio Mejia Madrid, Hector de Mauleon, Magali Tercero, Jorge Volpi, and Juan Villoro document the crisis and demand the world's attention.

From the other side of the world, we present poetry commemorating last year's Japanese earthquake, and launch a new serial about an unexpected pig.