Hiranmoy Lahiri reviews Ginny Tapley Takemori’s new translation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s 1967 story, Grave of the Fireflies.
November 18, 2025
November 12, 2025
Andrew Benzinger reviews A Livable Future Is Possible, the recent book-length collection of C. J. Polychroniou’s interviews with Noam Chomsky.
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.”
“If we reassign our role as language creators to AI, we will lose what makes us human.”
In her ongoing show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Sasha Stiles and her collaborative alter ego, Technelegy, continue to explore what it means to be alive in the age of artificial intelligence.
“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
“In all directions—our sky is blocked. / Muttering “screw it,” shrugging “who gives a damn?” / The nation’s once again / Spineless and stuck,” from “Laws Are Mutating . . .” by Vanechka (trans. Yana Kane, edited by Bruce Esrig)
“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.
Bringing together her practices as a translator and interpreter, a linguist is challenged to hold space for voices not her own and to reckon with what it means to speak for someone without speaking over them.
The owner of a small, independent press considers the role of book reviews in getting books into readers’ hands.
“Our Minds Are Porous and Forgetfulness Seeps In”: A Conversation on Translation and AI with Ilan Stavans
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.
“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.
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