“Guo wondered, ‘What if people never knew what that [Christendom] is? If it said ‘Taoism’ instead, would you still listen to the story?’ This is the key to opening the treasure box that is Call Me Ishmaelle.”
October 21, 2025
Ibrahim Nasrallah is the 2026 Neustadt Laureate.
October 21, 2025
September 04, 2025
August 13, 2025
“We are not in the era of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robots (or reboots), WhatsApps, Zooms, Facebooks, or anything of the kind. We are in the age of utter sloth.”
Ilan Stavans has tackled some of the most complex literary problems imaginable, ranging from piecing together the fragmentary work of poetry composed first in Nahuatl to teasing out the cultural bias in Spanish translations of that same work. With his skill in pattern recognition, recognizing bias, and evaluating multiple potential interpretations, Stavans is a perfect writer and scholar to chat with about the game-changing advent of AI.
“If we reassign our role as language creators to AI, we will lose what makes us human.”
“When an ancient-rock splits open — / trees and skies starkly mirror / the tectonic drama on the stone’s gaping / weathered face,” from “Split Fossil,” by Sudeep Sen
“At forty we have two kids running, / shouting, crying / that the sand is too hot, / that we argued / that nothing here brings joy,” from “Future Plans,” by Rosa Berbel (trans. Jane Stringham)
“And Mama told me: / ‘I’ll have a broken daughter / and I’ll comb her hair with all my teeth,’” from [And Mama told me], by Mónica Ojeda (trans. Kymm Coveney)
Remembering Technology
This short fiction is from the collection The Woman Dies (Europa, 2025), Aoko Matsuda’s feminist tales from Japan that blend humor, surrealism, and sharp social critique.
Just Now
A South African writer born after the Group Areas Act returns to Simon’s Town with her mother, who used to visit the old fishing town before it was declared white.
Besieged
When martial law is declared in Korea in winter 2024 by a president seeking to stage an autocoup, the writer is pushed to revisit her teenage years spent under military rule and confront the damage and despair encountered by her family as she approached the cusp of a precarious adulthood.
Now a writer and university professor, Iheoma Nwachukwu played professional chess in Nigeria for ten years. Here he considers what chess’s more rigorous contact with AI can teach professors grappling with the spark between students and AI.
Do we want to live in a society in which humans are increasingly pushed aside, de-skilled, and demoralized? The author looks at literary translation as a test case of to find out.
A frequent WLT contributor faces a quandary likely faced by book reviewers, and avid readers, everywhere: which books to take with them when moving house?
“To Be Free You Need a Lot of Rules”: 5 Questions for Chiara Valerio
5 Questions for Chiara Valerio, author of The Little I Knew, which was a best-seller in Italy and published in English in 2025.
“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.
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