Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Shteyngart. Illustration by Jen Rickard BlairThrough a series of inter…
Essays
Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the diff…
illustration: jen rickard blairOn the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps even…
Offering tea in the Qadia/Rwanga IDP (internally displaced persons) camp, in the western Dohuk governorate of northern Iraq. As of February 2017, the population of the camp was 14,762 (including some…
Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret BenzetReturning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its su…
Photo: Daniel Tellman / FlickrSocieties venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change the…
Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh WesleyTaking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the fol…
Each year, writers and musicians from across the globe converge in Kosovo for the three-day Festival of Literature in Orllan, a vibrant celebration of local and international literature. Here, poe…
Isolation: Companion of Conscience, by Georgitta J. ValiyamattamIconoclast Indian novelist Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, set in the maximum city of Mumbai, is not only the f…
Remnants of an oil spill in the Niger Delta. Photo: Michael Uwemedimo / cmapping.netNiger Delta poet Ebi Yeibo’s verse lyrically engages the Nigerian nation on looming postindependence issues…
Portrait of “the master of the ghazal” Ghalib, by Urdu Shayar. Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock PhotoPoetry is of course a universal art, but is it possible for a particular poetic form to be not only uni…
www.flickr.com/people/limone51After you died, I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and car…
A group of women stripped naked in broad daylight to protest against the brutality of the Assam Rifles army contingent (July 2004).Braiding together an epic story and India’s ongoing supp…
“One Foot Wrong” by Parée Erica. Parée Erica/FlickrAgainst the background of the Polish parliament’s consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, J…
Photo: Flickr.com/people/nex230Do we need a special issue devoted solely to women writers? Indeed we do. Author and translator Alison Anderson explains why.Do we still need magazines…
Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir, Snow Symbol I, 2015, 100 x 100 cm, oil on linen. Photo by Pétur Thomsen.In these philosophical meditations for a Reykjavík art exhibit, Icelandic author Oddný Eir looks int…
Made of iron, this scold’s bridle from Belgium dates from the 16th or 17th century. The strut of metal that went into the wearer’s mouth to hold down her tongue has broken off.If there’s…
Photo by Kevin LauThe following essay argues for the importance of shifting world literature courses away from “survey” and toward the interrogation of categories of knowledge that typica…
Tesla owns the expertise on electric cars, Picasso on cubism, and the Neustadt Prize on casting a large net to evaluate international literature in unbiased fashion. And in so doing, the…
An artist adds color to a building in a Delhi alleyway. Photo by Vikram Singh.The twenty-first century has seen Delhi go from being just another nondescript capital city to a throbbing me…
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran FoerRecent fiction by Junot Díaz, Paul Kingsnorth, and Ali Smith offers an emergent project for contemporary world literature by yoking the histo…
Ghassan Zaqtan (left) and Mahmoud Darwish in a 2007 photo taken by Palestinian poet Bashir Shalash.After presenting a sweeping landscape of Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic days—w…
A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgress…
Members of the Sheffield, UK–based performance company Forced Entertainment on stage in And on the Thousandth Night at the Hebbel am Ufer performance center in Berlin. Photo: Hugo Glendin…
Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj created Unearthed (in Memoriam) (2014) out of repurposed book covers. He calls the work “a quiet gesture, an archive to remember those who have been forgo…