December 19, 2024
The editors of World Literature Today announce their shortlist of nominees, drawn from the pages of the magazine in 2024, for the anthology Best Literary Translations 2026.
December 18, 2024
When authorities take Penny Barnhill’s little girl, the single mother must get Phoebe back and find a way—despite being broke—to escape their shattered, bankrupt hometown for good. Standing in Penny’s way is her disability, a case
As one of the world’s preeminent writers, Devi’s work tests readers’ ethics while crossing corporeal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Here, a professor of global francophone literature shares how she and her students found enlightenment in such multiple crossings.
In this essay by Devi’s principal English-language translator, he asks: When will we stop reducing Devi to the labels of Mauritian writer, Indian Ocean writer, African writer, francophone writer, feminist writer, woman writer?
“you dance / because your bellies are empty . . . / that’s how you fight loneliness & the biting economic meltdown . . . / you men with villages of wives,” from “the dance,” by Vonani Bila
This erasured handmade map was crafted through and over Samuel Penniman Bates’s chapter on the 25th United States Colored Regiment in his History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (first published in 1869).
“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)
(books read when drunk)
Avid reader Andor Femin and the narrator of this flash fiction don’t always see eye to eye, but their observations about reading are always amusing.
Game Land
Welcome to Game Land, where your every pleasure will be satisfied.
Love All
A lover of love, everything Momo does is designed to give her the advantage.
What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? From Gone with the Wind to detective novels, Immanuel Kim provides an overview of reading in the DPRK.
Reminding us that “freedom is a muscle,” a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose own Drum Dream Girl has been banned urges us to set aside fear and speak, write, and read about liberty and equality.
5 Questions for Devika Rege
Devika Rege’s novel Quarterlife (Liveright, 2024) is populated with millennials who are discovering who they are and what they’re for in what is sometimes called “the New India.” The novel was a finalist for and won multiple awards in India and was recently hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “the best debut of the year.”
5 Questions for Zahid Rafiq
In December 2024 Tin House published Zahid Rafiq’s debut short-story collection, The World with Its Mouth Open. In these eleven stories from Kashmir, ordinary people have unusual days, which play out in city streets, parks, shops, a graveyard, and a home construction site, where those digging make a strange discovery.
“Literature Is Iceland’s Cultural Legacy”: A Conversation with Thórdís Helgadóttir
An interview with Icelandic poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Thórdís Helgadóttir
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