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In his latest book, World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (2024), the distinguished Chinese comparatist Zhang Longxi makes an eloquent and sophisticated plea to move beyond…
Daniel Simon
- “Japanese Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century,” which headlines the current issue of World Literature Today, manifests the magazine’s long-running interest in modern literature…
I write for the future because my present is demolished. —Fady Joudah, [. . .]: Poems The ellipsis that constitutes the title of Fady Joudah’s latest book of poems, [. . .], might be broken up into it…
Here are some things we cannot guarantee you: guarantees, or history’s purity.—Pádraig Ó Tuama, “Rite of Baptism” In his provocative 2021 study The Editor Function: Literary Publishin…
March 29, 2024Sandhill cranes displaying and dancing at dawn / Photo by Brian Lasenby / Adobe StockSince 2011, WLT has built up a Soundcloud archive of more than two hundred recordings consisting mostl…
The volcano is perhaps no longer just the symbol of social or warlike violence but the metaphor of a real ecological time bomb to come. —Charif Majdalani, “Dancing at the Foot of a Volcano” For more t…
December 12, 2023As World Literature Today’s ninety-seventh year of continuous publication comes to a close, the editors are delighted to announce WLT’s shortlist of Pushcart nominees for 2023. P…
. . . you move the thick needle between the threads of the warp and fasten and return to the other side with the same calming motion. —Avigail Antman, “Warp and Woof,” trans. Linda Stern Zisquit In “U…
A [literary] journal is the most elegant way to conspire. —J. G. Cobo Borda, “Paz’s Workshop,” WLT (1982) I n his recent book Little Magazine, World Form (2016), Eric Bulson makes a compelling case fo…
Finding Hope in Language Revitalization: A Conversation with The Language Conservancy’s Wilhelm Meya
August 31, 2023Children from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Towaoc, Colorado, study the Ute language using new e-learning platform Nuuwayga created by The Language Conservancy / Photo courtesy of TLCOn August 9,…
One of the characteristics that binds Indian literatures and begins to define a canon distinct from others is a belief in the primacy and potency of the word and utterance. —Rodney Simard (Cherokee),…
AS WORLD LITERATURE TODAY counts down to its centennial year (2026–2027), I’m continually struck by the uncanny vision of our founding editor, Roy Temple House, to launch a quarterly magazine…
Photo by Yousef Al-AbdullahWith her latest book of essays, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (2022), Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi offers a “resistance readi…
BOOKS REMAIN one of the great achievements of the human experiment. Over the millennia, the seismic shifts that began with the rise of languages, consolidation of the alphabet, and Gutenberg’s inventi…
The editors would like to acknowledge a generous subvention for this issue from the University of Oklahoma’s Romanoff Center for Russian Studies. We are especially grateful to Co-Directors Emily D. Jo…
December 14, 2022Photo by Hans Eiskonen / Unsplash Fresh off our delight in seeing Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem “Fireflies” in the Pushcart Prize XLVII anthology, the editors of World Literature Today…
IN HIS SPEECH accepting the 2022 Neustadt Prize, Boubacar Boris Diop listed several of his intellectual and literary mentors: Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Cheik…
All of this // is a conjuring. . . . There is evidence everywhere. – Ada Limón, “The Hurting Kind” SEVERAL OF MY favorite poems in The Hurting Kind (2022), Ada Lim…
Anna Badkhen Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays New York Review Books Bright Unbearable Reality is a book of micro and macro scales: piscine, tidal, musical, temporal…
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories. – Elie W…
August 3, 2022Photo by Sofia Simon In his poem called “The Man on the Dump” (1938), Wallace Stevens writes: “Days pass like papers from a press.” Stevens, who was in his late fifties when he wrote the poem on the…
July 18, 2022When the forecast for the next ten days promises afternoon highs ranging from 102 to 111 degrees, you can bet I’ll be looking for really thick books to pile high for as much shade, and diversion, as…
when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested /but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough. – Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War”…
a dark angel flies with a shofar playing his trumpet in flight – Boris Khersonsky HOW IS IT possible to think about art during a time of war? Years before the Russian milit…
I think there is something transformative about living through, liberating yourself and evolving past your brutish histories. – Saba Sebhatu, “Final Landing” PRIOR TO GOING …
