Photo of Hon Lai Chu by Jeffy Lau
In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines, 2025), intimacy becomes a matter of state policy. The Conjoinment Act…
Book Reviews
-
May 22, 2025 -
May 21, 2025Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite (2019), dir. Bong Joon Ho / Courtesy of IMDB If you have ever taken a writing class in Europe or North America (aka the West), you have likely h… -
May 12, 2025Amanda Hess / Photo by Loreto Caceres / Wikipedia If you have not yet read the writing of Amanda Hess, you have been depriving yourself of the most insightful commentary on our times.… -
May 7, 2025Photo by Ignacio Gallego / Flickr In the pantheon of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) stands out for his poetic renown as much as for the effigies and exiles of himself an… -
April 22, 2025Photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash Strange Pictures (HarperVia, 2025) is the first book released in English by the mysterious and cryptic best-selling Japanese author Uket… -
April 18, 2025Photo by Kit Leong / Adobe Stock Those who have not suffered trauma directly tend to think of it as an event. It is not. Trauma is an atmosphere; trauma terraforms, creates a new world… -
March 26, 2025Like many other Ukrainian writers since 2022, Ostap Slyvynsky has answered a unique call of duty, one of cultural and lexicographical preservation. In his compilation A Ukrainian Dictionary o… -
March 12, 2025Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) was an author immersed in the Western literary tradition. His first readings were of classical authors and the Spanish Golden Age. When he finally decided to write, he f… -
February 5, 2025Background photo by Taiga / Adobe Stock / Author photo courtesy of AUC Press Years ago, I visited the Alhambra in Granada and was awestruck by the grand palace and fortress that was built d… -
January 28, 2025Ọlábísí Àjàlá on his scooter / Wikipedia Nigerian journalist Mashood Ọlábísí Àjàlá (1934–1999), whose name became synonymous with the word “traveler” due to his reputation for wanderlust, d… -
January 21, 2025Edited by John Zheng, Conversations with Lenard D. Moore (University Press of Mississippi, 2024) collects sixteen interviews conducted over three decades by Lenard D. Moore’s (b. 1958) p… -
December 12, 2024In her semi-autobiographical novel The Camp: A Little Girl from Karabakh (Shuddhashar, 2022), Gunel Movlud refers to her life as an internally displaced person during the First Nagorno-Karaba… -
November 19, 2024Yassini Girls (Beacon Books, 2024), the new novel by Shereen Malherbe, invites readers into a rich and emotional narrative, weaving together the personal and the historical. Through the inter… -
October 15, 2024Five or six years ago, I was reading Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919–1990) with my Arabic teacher and thought of writing an article about him in English, but I found only one translation on Amazon. I was pu… -
September 10, 2024Caroline Cingria, C. F. Ramuz, pastel (1903) / Images courtesy of Noël Cordonier Lumen ObscurumLight and darkness are a major part of the global human experience; their co… -
September 10, 2024Photo of the author by Jeff Norman / ZeinaAzzam.com In Zeina Azzam’s mesmerizing collection of poems Some Things Never Leave You (Tiger Bark Press, 2023), tenderness means gazing d… -
September 4, 2024Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Fernando Vallejo’s The Abyss (New Directions, 2024) is reaching new audiences in Yvette Siegert’s updated English translation. Twenty-three years after it… -
August 29, 2024Gjekë Marinaj’s Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems, co-translated by the author and Frederick Turner (Syracuse University Press, 2023), marks the English debut of an Alb… -
August 15, 2024The first sentence of Janice Weizman’s The Wayward Moon (Toby Press, 2024) sets the stage with clarity and precision: “I, Rahel Bat Yair, was born in the city of Sura, which lies on the weste… -
August 6, 2024Photo of Diop by Gavyn Redd / Shevaun Williams Photography On September 26, 2002, Le Joola, the passenger ship relaying Dakar to Ziguinchor in the south of Senegal, capsized on its… -
July 18, 2024Covid-19 took the toll of over seven million lives globally since the pandemic began in late 2019. In the US alone the death toll estimate is more than a million. Yet this devastating tragedy has been… -
June 27, 2024A recent Parisian exhibit about the pre-impressionists revealed that before painting techniques changed, artists abandoned heroic subjects and eternal, noble emotions to portray ordinary people and sc… -
June 25, 2024Photo by Shane Leonard As I wrote in World Literature Today some years ago, the quality of Stephen King’s writing abilities are all too frequently underestimated because of his pop… -
June 20, 2024With its stunning wraparound cover, featuring a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, this edition of Raoul Vaneigem’s landmark Resistance to Christianity: A Chro… -
May 3, 2024Olivia Elias’s singular voice has not gone unnoticed in the Palestinian poetic landscape. A French-speaking poet and child of the Nakba, her work, published only since 2015, has already been picked up…
Recent Posts
Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) was a Puerto Rican–born educator, poet, essayist, and journalist who wrote mostly in Spanish but also in English toward…
At the heart of my conversation with Singapore-born, US-educated, Paris-based writer, translator, musician, and artist Fiona Sze-Lorrain are two…
On Friday, February 20 from 3:00–4:30pm, WLT Editor in Chief Daniel Simon will give a thirty-minute talk about his new anthology, A…
“When the war broke out, Ginster, a young man of twenty-five, found himself in the provincial capital of M.” He goes out to the town square, where a…
Ally Ang / Courtesy of Alice James Books
In Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025), Ally Ang differs from…
