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…
Editors’ Picks
Alina BronskyBaba Dunja’s Last LoveTrans. Tim MohrEuropa Editions Alina Bronsky is skillful at inventing darkly humorous protagonists, and Baba Dunja is no exception. This short novel is a surpri…
Petina GappahRotten RowFaber & Faber2016 Petina Gappah’s new collection of stories is named after the street where the criminal courts in Harare sit: Rotten Row, where the powerful a…
Guus KuijerThe Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis Trans. Laura Watkinson Seven Stories Press, 2016 The Bible has occupied a central position in W…
With a toddler to parent, WLT’s book review editor, Rob Vollmar, isn’t anticipating being able to go much of anywhere this summer, so he’s relying on his summer rea…
Editorial assistant Sara Wilson’s summer reading picks vary in content from knotty lovers’ quarrels to narratives gathered from the aftershock of warfare. She’s added some Neruda…
Summer weather has already arrived in Austin, and it’s the perfect excuse for WLT’s digital media editor, Jen Rickard Blair, to jump-start her annual summer reading…
Alfredo Véa Jr.The Mexican FlyboyUniversity of Oklahoma Press2016 Alfredo Véa Jr.’s The Mexican Flyboy is a novel likely to enhance its author’s reputation as a writer primed to…
With two novels and one book of literary miscellany, WLT managing editor Michelle Johnson’s summer reading list is taking shape. Though she’ll no doubt spend many early morni…
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…
Roland Glasser, tr. Deep Vellum. 2015.Tram 83 (2015) is a lively, frenetic novel filled with a motley cast of characters lustful for pleasure, prosperity, and power. It’s based…
Jim Hinks, Masashi Matsuie & Michael Emmerich, eds. Manchester. Comma Press. 2015. ISBN 9781905583577.This new collection of short stories by Japanese wri…
The Mountain and the WallBy Alisa GanievaDeep Vellum The Vienna MelodyBy Ernst LotharEuropa Editions Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wal…
If a written, spoken language is one of the characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals, what would happen if the ability to speak—to even comprehend the spoken word—suddenly vanished…
Graywolf Press, 2014How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project a l…
Still writing “on this earthquake fault” in San Francisco, feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima continues to create her revolutionary verse. At eighty, aged out of the thirty-under-thirty and forty-under…
With a dose of wit and self-deprecation, Aaliya is a narrator who doesn’t fail to entertain. Rabih Alameddine invites the reader into Aaliya’s late-life crisis where—after a few glasses of red wine—sh…
Wilfred Price has established himself as a respectable, reliable member of his small and tightly woven rural community of Narberth, Wales. He performs his duties impeccably as the town’s undertaker, c…
While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the…
A review of The Gardens of Flora Baum, by Julia Budenz, 5 vols. (Chelmsford, Massachusetts: Carpathia Press, 2011)It is, perhaps, asking too much to expect a reader, who has not lived in the…
For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao YiwuNew Harvest, 2013Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu J…
The Bridge of BeyondSimone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childh…
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David SedarisLittle, Brown, 2013 In David Sedaris’s new collection, the essays begin with a visit to his Parisian dentist and end with his first…
The Sarabande of Sara’s Band by Larysa DenysenkoMichael M. Naydan & Svitlana Bednazh, tr. Glagoslav Publications, 2013The familiar quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “H…
Angela Rodel, tr. Open Letter Books, 2013“I believe that the longer I keep the shutter open the more life gets captured on the negative.”Bulgarian-born novelist and playwright Zachary Ka…
