“Our age is a checkpoint,” writes Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. The photograph on this issue’s cover, taken by Alex Webb, depicts a fence in California dividing Mexico and the US. The photo to the left, taken by Staff Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez of the US Air Force, shows a checkpoint in Amariya, Iraq, east of the American military’s Camp Victory. Our world seems ever more crowded by walls intended to keep people in or keep them out, so perhaps it is unsurprising that references to borders and border guards around the globe crop up again and again in the pages that follow.

Ahmed Ali, an interpreter and journalist who fled Baghdad in 2006, recalls flashing a fake ID at a checkpoint in Iraq so he could report on a village’s response to Saddam Hussein’s arrest. Later Ali’s brother-in-law disappeared after being stopped at another checkpoint. Rabih Alameddine, who grew up in Beirut, tells Aleksandar Hemon, who grew up in Sarajevo, about his cousin who got stopped at a checkpoint and knew she was going to die. She started telling her life story—and they let her pass. “We are both from what I call ‘death on the shoulder’ cultures,” Alameddine says. “Many of my relatives saved themselves by entertaining people with guns.”

Other writers take a more metaphorical approach to barriers and boundaries and the openings that sometimes allow us to get to the other side. Sarah Ruhl’s Orpheus travels from overworld to underworld, riding a note of his music straight to the Door of the Dead. Joshua Furst’s narrator drives frantically through psychological territory, somewhere between denying responsibility and acknowledging disaster. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s corpse washer recalls a moment that divided her life in two, while Xiaolu Guo’s call girl seems caught between her present and her past. Young-ha Kim juxtaposes death and its simulation, beginnings and their ends.

In spirited conversation Péter Esterházy and Wayne Koestenbaum survey the border between autobiography and make-believe, knowing and not knowing, intertextuality and “cheerful theft.” And in a fabulously wayward essay (written in five-word lines), Koestenbaum revels in Andy Warhol’s fluid movements between high art and commerce, home and Factory, the inaccessible and the available, screen memories and screen tests. Daniel Kehlmann and Jeffrey Eugenides explore literary terrain that might allow crossing over from female to male and from fish to mammal, while Ian McEwan and Steven Pinker listen for what is left unsaid: the ambiguities and innuendos that build walls between individuals, the inability to read between lines that leaves some of us in a state of psychological exile, no checkpoint in sight.