Photo by Yermek Sherkhan / Unsplash.com
Now a writer and university professor, Iheoma Nwachukwu played professional chess in Nigeria for ten years. Here he considers what chess’s more rigorous…
Essays
Photo by Oscar McGlone / Unsplash.com We are not in the era of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robots (or reboots), WhatsApps, Zooms, Facebooks, or anything of the kind. We are in the a…
Photo by Gerd Altmann / Pixabay.com Do we want to live in a society in which humans are increasingly pushed aside, de-skilled, and demoralized? The author looks at literary translation as a tes…
Artwork by local_doctor / Stock.adobe.com Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden…
Installation view of A Living Poem, Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 2025 / Photo by Jonathan Dorado In her ongoing show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Sasha Stiles and h…
Photo by eugen / Stock.adobe.com A frequent WLT contributor faces a quandary likely faced by book reviewers, and avid readers, everywhere: which books to take with them when moving hou…
Photo of Tumbalá, Chiapas by Carol Rose Little Bringing together her practices as a translator and interpreter, a linguist is challenged to hold space for voices not her own and to reckon with…
We asked Ming Di to take a look at how US poets have been reviewed in China for the past decade. The results provide a window into what reviewers are seeing in US poets’ work and which poets are m…
Photo by Yury Nam / Unsplash.com The owner of a small, independent press considers the role of book reviews in getting books into readers’ hands.In March, Publishers Weekly—one of…
Photo by lucadp / Stock.adobe.com A longtime publisher of books in translation—and reviewer of translations who reads some one hundred translations a year—offers some best practices for reviewi…
Photo courtesy of Fotografía de autor desconocido., Public domain / Wikimedia Commons How do book reviews affect writers—for better, for worse, not at all? After receiving few and most…
Still courtesy of IMDb What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing…
A writer and his family become part of the modern saga of displacement and find themselves among a menagerie of companions.As we left the house, our panting was so loud, it sounded like the h…
Photo by Abdel Hakeem After seeking safety in Cairo, relentless questions remain: Is there a return? Will hunger haunt my children again?The journey of survival was never ordinary—it was a…
Photo by Emad Nassar A writer living in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza faces great loss with no way to say goodbye.When writing about Gaza, one must purify the pen seven times, one time with…
Photo by Abed Rahman A writer in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza contemplates the many losses across multiple displacements and what the destruction wrought on Gaza says about the nature of t…
Photo by Haneen Salem Before burning them, a writer reads through his diaries to recall disappointments, failed love stories, and the details of ordinary relationships.Whenever I think bac…
Photo by Fadi Thabet I have chosen to carry my camera and pen instead of guns, to tell my story and promote peace around the world; I believe peace is a finer horse…
Daulet Zhanshin / Photo by Dmitry Zimnitsky Myth lives on in Central Asia, but it has changed shape. Through multimedia projects, audiences become participants in rituals rather than mere parti…
Guadalupe Nettel (left) and Rosalind Harvey alternated reading Nettel’s keynote in Spanish and English / Photo by Michelle Johnson Rosalind Harvey presented an earlier version of this…
Blurring the Interspecies Divide: Eeb Allay Ooo! and Multispecies Cohabitation in Anthropocene Delhi
From Eeb Allay Ooo! / Courtesy of the director Disclaimer: This essay and my accompanying interview with Prateek Vats reveal crucial plot details about the film.Eeb Allay Ooo!…
Photo from the Extinct? series by Ravi Agarwal / raviagarwal.com / Reproduced by permission of the artist It is a truth universally acknowledged that Bombay is the spiritual home for India…
Photo of Saless Bookstore, Tehran by Sepideh Nazaralizadeh Many years ago, in the old days of dial-up internet, when I was still living in Iran, I would spend time reading book reviews online, maki…
In this review-essay, Laura Pensa considers Las niñas del naranjel, a historical fiction that is also intimate, deviant, and populated by other presences. Newly translated into English by…
Black beachgoers Verna Deckard and Arthur Lewis pictured in front of a fence demarcating Santa Monica’s whites-only Club Casa Del Mar. Blacks were relegated to a small roped-off area known as the Ba…
October 21, 2025
September 04, 2025
August 13, 2025
