Photo by Fernando Rodríguez/Flickr
Zugzwang: a chess position where any move is disadvantageous. Eduard Màrquez applies the term to his characters who, he observes, “are subjected to forces and s…
Fiction
Via Prenestina. Photo by Carlo Busini/Flickr In contrast to Michela Murgia’s Il mondo deve sapere (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 43–46), Peppe Fiore’s Ness…- On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, the narrator recounts three near-death experiences and his journey from Morocco to France. With nods toward Dostoevsky and Genet (echoing the Lazarus scene be…
- Alberto Chimal published these stories in Spanish as “An Alphabet of Twitter-Stories: A Study by Horacio Kustos” (@hkustos) in summer 2012. In a self-interview Chimal published…
- Photo by crowdive/Flickr Based on a legend from eighteenth-century Bengal, Shokhi Rongomala is Shaheen Akhtar’s third novel. The book follows Rongomala, a beautiful and…
- Photo by Tortured Mind Photography/Flickr Once again using the lens provided by detective fiction, Leonardo Padura magnifies various aspects of Cuban reality for his readers. “…
- Marie and Frank were lifelong renters, and though moving their things out of a house was like unloading a ship, their old house didn’t sail away. It sat there, on the South Dakota plains, waiting—…
- Photo Shannalee/Flickr In the first translation of his work into English, South Korean writer Kim Kyŏnguk imagines an ad executive confronting a man who may be his f…
- During the time my father was in the hospital, it made sense to leave the car in the hospital’s underground garage. I would stop at the top of the entrance’s small abyss and let my white Opel slide do…
- In a haze of marijuana and beer, a vacationing photojournalist discusses the state of humanity with a West Indian boy. What are we without our addictions, our distractions, and are we doomed if we…
- www.flickr.com/people/paloetic “Everything has a price,” but how do you put a price tag on the human condition? In Mahmoud Saeed’s unflinching story of abjection and brutality, the moral…
- As this story about changing laws and changing times in South Africa reveals, repealing the letter of a law will not necessarily kill its insidious spirit. Photo illustration by…
- To the revolutionaries of Egypt who left their couches and burnt their televisions It’s raining again. Like the winters of my childhood. But my head has changed and is covered in sca…
- For several days, it is quiet in the apartment. The sister and brother are playing quietly, and Daddy and Mama are not talking. The silence is thick and heavy. It echoes sometimes, too, when the boy a…
- Photo by uopfindsomt/Flickr For Daniel Sada The dedication was short and impersonal, followed by the unlikely signature: Lauro H. Batallón. Santiago held the copy in his open hand…
- Apologia? Manifesto? Confessional? In this stream-of-consciousness narrative, a Havana drag queen tells her story. “Fátima, Queen of the Night,” published here for the first time, won Cuban writer…
- It’s Christmas, and since it’s Christmas it seems repugnant not to have a steady boyfriend to give one gifts. A boyfriend, in short, who will take you to the Ebro River Delta from time to time, a plac…
- Still from The Coward (1965), based on Mitra’s story, directed by Satyajit Ray and starring Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee Karuna brought me my morning cup of tea herself. I cou…
- Two friends in New York City find themselves unexpectedly at a roundabout where life, love, desire, and death all want right of way. In the struggle that ensues, there is a winner, but it isn’t o…
- Adrianne Kalfopoulou And then what you wanted was salt, . . . but you could not turn to look. —Cecilia Woloch, “Salt” My parents were deliberate about escaping their place of origin and…
- Zainab. Zaina-a-a-a-b. Zainab. Is it really you catching me in this muffled moment? No, you have not changed. But where is your body? You approach with your usual smile, seductive as ever…
- The Long Way Home by Carsten Jenson The following excerpt serves as the introduction to Vi sejlede bare (2009; We just sailed)—Jensen’s elegant book on the making of We, the…
- African immigrants have permeated the Eurozone in recent years, legally and illegally, in search of economic opportunities among the demographically aging populations of the north. In Austrian wr…
- Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958) is a highly regarded Japanese novelist. She was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1994 for Hebi o fumu (Tread on a snake). To date, her only novel av…
- Every couple inhabit a private world of their own, and share an intimate language of words, silence, and gestures that only they understand. Such is a love story between a deaf husband and a blind…
