Courtesy of lanadelrey.com I was introduced to Lana Del Rey by way of Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her haunting line “will you still love me when I’m no longer youn…

Music—and jazz in particular—is an important element of Sweden, my debut novel about American deserters on the run in Vietnam War–era Japan. One of the three protagonists is an…

> Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore is a uniquely compelling book that mixes the mundane and the mystical into a wonderful representation of magical realism and modern Japanese cultur…

From epic sagas of the thirteenth century to modern crime fiction, Icelandic literature has something for everyone. Despite the country’s small population, Iceland has a rich literary culture and a t…

Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar. In the March/April 2016 Global Frequency column, we took a listen to Musique de Nuit, a collaboration between French cellist Vincent Segal and Malian kora p…

Alif. Photo by Tony Elieh. To celebrate the release of Alif’s Aynama-Rtama (reviewed in WLT’s inaugural World Music column here), we’ve put together a short but substantive playli…

Zoran Živković’s Hidden Camera (translated by Alice Copple-Tošić) unfolds within that indefinite space between dream and reality. Upon receiving a mysterious film-screening invitatio…

Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson, is a pairing of two witty, charming protagonists: Renée, a fifty-four-year-old con…

Photos by Jen Rickard Blair We’ve all come across books marked up by some fiend with no appreciation for the sanctity of the written word. Senseless underlining of unremarkable sentences, pedantic not…

“There was the music and the clutter of voices from the big house, and the wind shoving and pulling at them, and she thought, I want this, I know I want this. This is how you get from one world to the…

“They say time finds you out, don’t they?”– The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a quiet sort of novel. His narrator introsp…