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The page is both full of death and free of it. – Edwidge Danticat
“And because my mother did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother were te…
Daniel Simon
November 16, 2018Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Photo by Phillip Kalantzis Cope / Flickr In the wake of the October 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the…
Manuel with Alice / Courtesy of alicewalkersgarden.comIn conjunction with Erik Gleibermann’s interview with Alice Walker that headlines the November issue of World Lit…
Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and PlaceEd. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed EditionsIn many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the ide…
The Student Advisory Board officers for 2018–2019 (clockwise from top): Reid Bartholomew, James Farner, Kayla Ciardi, and Abi Clarke ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS AGO, when World Literature Today fi…
. . . like a premonition of eternity. – Xavier Bordes M ost writers and—by extension—artists take the brute facts of existence as a starting point, then fashion their work with v…
That the ears might hear what the eyes can’t see.– MonchoachiFrom vinyl collections to mixtapes to digital playlists, music aficionados have always curated their favorites alongside bookshelv…
How does one become a writer? For German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, it was less epiphany than the gradual accretion of circumstance and intention. Here is what she told Haaretz in 2011: “I tur…
Not only is World Literature Today one of the oldest continuously published magazines devoted to international literature, but a remarkable continuity has prevailed on our masthead page in th…
The Art of DeathEdwidge DanticatGraywolf Press (2017)It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about…
Well, Lord, this / infinitesimal speckcould fill the universe with praise.– Marilyn Nelson, “The Dimensions of the Milky Way” When Marilyn Nelson delivered her keynote talk, “Bo…-
Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.– Yehuda Bauer Just this morning, as I began drafting my note for the current…
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The project advanced by this forum is urgent: individually and collectively to contest the pitched, pervasive, pernicious intolerance of our age.– H. L. Hix, “Belief in an Age of Intolerance”…
Harvey Dunn, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, 1926 / Courtesy South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South DakotaFor more, read two new poems by Ted Kooser.While in Lincoln to attend the…
Every story had a face, a first and last name, a mother or son, brother or sister, losses and days of triumph.– Leonora Flis, “Zeroes”The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by aw…
Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire.Anne CarsonFloatRandom HouseI found…-
In the spring 1992 issue of World Literature Today, published to mark the quincentenary of Cristoforo Colombo’s encounter with the New World, Robert Berner writes: “The fact of the matter is…
Kim StaffordThe Flavor of Unity: Post-Election PoemsLittle Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the gen…-
How could utopia fail? – Elizabeth Fifer, “Dead Reckoning”In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collaps…
January 31, 2017For the past decade, World Literature Today has been proud to collaborate with Beijing Normal University to bring out an annual Chinese edition of the magazine as well as a biannual journal,…-
Language written in the aftermath of extremity [arises] not from recollection in tranquility but from wanderings in a debris field. – Carolyn Forché, “An Inexhaustible Responsib…
In a country as big as America it is as impossible to prophesy as it is to generalize, without being tripped up, but it seems to me that there is room for hope as well as mistrust. The epic loses…
April 27, 2016An in-class haiku translation project (2013) / Photo courtesy of Kimiko HahnRecently, the Poetry Society of America announced award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn as its newly elected presiden…
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.…
Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zapot…
