September 12, 2024
Philip Metres reviews the 15th anniversary edition of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2024), which won WLT’s “21 Books for the 21st Century” readers’ poll.
September 10, 2024
Alice-Catherine Carls reviews Great Fear on the Mountain, the newly translated 1926 novel by Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.
June 18, 2024
June 05, 2024
The noticeable changes from twentieth- to twenty-first-century writers reflects the continued presence and importance of feminism internationally as Japanese women continue to move out of the spaces given to them within a male-dominated field.
Guest editor Rea Amit on the recent history of Japanese women writing literature. “women writers continue to uphold and revitalize the written word as a platform for meaningful engagement in the twenty-first century.”
“On the last solar term of autumn / so many good things are disappearing / The birds have printed their footsteps on the frosted tiles,” from “Frost‘s Descent,” by Ma Yongbo (trans. by Zack Rogow)
“n the free circulation of commodities, there is no center or edge. We are all part of the same untraceable sludge,” from “Dead Horse Bay,” by Santiago Acosta (trans. by Tiffany Troy & The Women in Translation Project)
“Grief sits in the bottom of my lungs — / maybe I cradle it there so I can breathe / every spore, every whiff of a slivering / land and an unfurling chest — / so I can say I have lived through the worst / of the fires,” from “The Air Has Changed,” by Rina Garcia Chua
The Roar
Deciding between his mother’s sweet love and his father’s conditional approval, Kimurguk endures a harrowing rite of passage to transform from boy to man.
You Have to Read This!
Be careful what you wish for—especially online, especially if you’re a woman—in this modern adaptation of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.”
The Devil’s Offspring
Desperate to have a child, a couple takes an unorthodox route to conception. But did they bargain with the devil?
Shizue Ogawa pays particular attention to the resonances between Western and Eastern culture that inspire her philosophical, aesthetic, and cosmic reflections. Here, Alice-Catherine Carls offers an overview of her remarkable literary career along with four of Ogawa’s best-known poems.
An American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns.
Inspired by a photo and the histories connected to it, a writer makes a film to mark Wole Soyinka’s ninetieth year.
Into the Woods: A Conversation with Italian Writer Maddalena Vaglio Tanet
A conversation with Italian novelist Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, whose debut novel, Untold Lessons, tells the story of schoolteacher Silvia who, plagued by guilt after the suicide of one of her students, suddenly goes missing.
The I-Know-Nothing Postulate: A Conversation with Ukrainian Filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa
A conversation with acclaimed Ukrainian film director Sergei Loznitsa, discussing the relationship between history and cinema, balancing documentary with narrative filmmaking, and much besides.
9 Questions for Elif Shafak
A conversation with Elif Shafak, whose new novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, hit the bookstores in August 2024. “Women are water-carriers, just like they are memory-bearers.”
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