“Because genuineness constantly eludes the characters, questioning where reality lies, Y entonces Teresa is one of the most brilliantly controlled novels I’ve read.”
October 07, 2025
Mahdiyeh Ezzati analyzes Fereshteh Molavi’s 2019 novel, Thirty Shadow Birds, in the context of the Iranian diaspora.
How do book reviews affect writers—for better, for worse, not at all? After receiving few and mostly bad reviews, Chilean author Juan Emar retreated to the countryside and wrote Umbral, his magnum opus.
September is World Kid Lit Month, a time to step beyond our familiar reading borders and explore horizons new. Here are four middle-grade novels and a picture book from five continents: a globe-trotting tour of recent publications to enjoy as a family or add breadth to your children’s bookshelves.
A writer in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza contemplates the many losses across multiple displacements and what the destruction wrought on Gaza says about the nature of this world.
“When the hand writes / it becomes clear there’s a narrator / who thinks while invoking,” from “Fail Better,” by Anna Gual (trans. AKaiser)
“The tents become lilies / sleeping on sadness / and pale moans,” from “The Grain of Our Hearts,” by Donia Al Amal Ismael (trans. Omnia Amin)
“Every time we lay claim to something, we fall into the yarns of loss. Don’t let the pretense of ownership run away with you,” from a poem by Marie Lundquist (trans. Miriam Åkervall)
Death Takes a Holiday (an excerpt)
Crime novel reviewer Florence (Florrie) Granat takes a bus tour through 1950s Italy. When one of her travel companions dies, she decides to investigate whether it really was natural causes.
Beach Penguins
“Things about the world that we learn at school: Penguins inhabit icescapes, they live closely packed together.”
Misfire
A Russian police officer tracks the surprising release of a prisoner to fight in the war against Ukraine. Recalling the prisoner’s capture, the officer regrets his gun’s misfire. Or was it?
The owner of a small, independent press considers the role of book reviews in getting books into readers’ hands.
A longtime publisher of books in translation—and reviewer of translations who reads some one hundred translations a year—offers some best practices for reviewing literary translations.
Myth lives on in Central Asia, but it has changed shape. Through multimedia projects, audiences become participants in rituals rather than mere participants, and multimedia artists create myth anew.
“Where the Reader Can Be Warned”: 7 Questions for George Gömöri
An interview with George Gömöri, a reviewer who has contributed to WLT for more than sixty years.
“Finding Affinities”: 8 Questions for Alice-Catherine Carls
An interview with Alice-Catherine Carls, an internationally published diplomatic and cultural historian of twentieth-century Europe, a translator, and a literary critic.
Doubt and Interpretation in Someone Like Us: A Conversation with Dinaw Mengestu
An interview with Dinaw Mengestu, whose latest novel Someone Like Us, is both “mystery and meditation” that “challenges [the] dominant narrative with a multiplicity of stories.”
REVIEW WLT
Tell us what you think about the current issue or about the website by filling out our form.
Subscribe
