Photos courtesy of the Old Bookstore / flateyribookstore.com
Flateyri welcomed me in the late afternoon, the daylight already giving way to those delicate northern blues that stretch across the Wes…
In Every Issue
In spring 2021 the editors invited twenty-one writers to nominate a single book, published since the year 2000, that had had a major influence on their own work. We published the longlist…
Photo by kiwisoul / Stock.adobe.com In Almaty, people read everywhere, bookstores are plentiful, and the Kazakh language, engaged in a “lingual fracas” with Russian, is reasserting itself.…
Photo of New York City by Kevin / Stock.adobe.com What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel th…
Tranströmer receiving the Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma in 1990 A Review of Tomas Tranströmer’s Tolkningar (Bonniers, 1999)“When Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), one of Sweden…
In Almaty, people read everywhere, bookstores are plentiful, and the Kazakh language, engaged in a “lingual fracas” with Russian, is reasserting itself. In central Almaty, in a leafy park off Gogol S…
To reach Nuria, you must traverse the crowded streets of central Nairobi, dodging motorcycles and weaving in and out of traffic. From the street, you’ll enter Bazaar Plaza—a large, stone-gra…
Photo of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town by ilyas Ayub / Alamy.com Taking the measure of Cape Town’s many contradictions, a visiting writer also discerns its manifold richness. One morning, twenty-four…
Illustration by William Wallace Denslow from The Wizard of Oz, 1900 / Wikimedia Our columnist looks at the smallest language on earth—both deliberately simple and full of ambiguity—and…
Norwegian speculative fiction is making its way into English in ever greater numbers as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. What makes this particularly exciting is that the four authors fue…
According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the period July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024, there were more than ten thousand instances of bans in US schools where students’ access to…
A review of Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Samuel Putnam (Viking, 1949) Don Quixote is the most frequently translated book in the history of literature [but], claims Mr. Putnam, has remained for En…
Photo by Parker Buske Once an icon in the literary district of Cornhill, Boston, Brattle Book Shop now fits snugly near downtown, a few paces from the Common. Hidden off Tremont, and down West Str…
Photo of Dust Breeding, by Man Ray, ca. 1920, by Liquid Liquid / Flickr.com Our columnist looks back through the centuries to rekindle our fascination with dust. Using the word itself as…
The year is coming to a close, but there are still new books yet to anticipate. Here are a few November and December releases that have caught our collective eye, plus one you can preorder for January…
“Back to the Essay” “In this same spirit of valuing possibility and innovation, the current editors are now equipping WLT to engage with this century much as Roy House equipped it for the last. . . .…
A conversation between Wassyla Tamzali and visual artists Rima Djahnine and Rafik Ouidi about the Déclic exhibition in 2023 (photo by Wassyla Tamzali). There are quite a few interesting artistic s…
Pages from the Voynich Manuscript by IanDagnall Computing / Alamy.com What does it say about our society that we are so fascinated by an object that seems to retain a meaning that nobody on earth…
I love reading debut books. They often show authors at their most raw, exploring their fundamental obsessions, and tapping into deeply held beliefs. For most writers, the road to publishing takes…
Photo of fry bread courtesy of the author Desperately wanting to find a space to further her relationship with Native American food culture, a writer travels to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, thinking it mi…
Cardenal reading in Pablo Neruda’s La Chascona, 2009 / Photo by Roman Bonnefoy / Wikipedia A review of Ernesto Cardenal’s Homage to the American Indians, trans. Monique Altschul & Car…
Photo by Marcie McCauley Beneath a warren of streetcar wires on Dundas Street between Little Italy and Little Portugal, nestled among other local businesses—sports bars and laundromats, convenienc…
Photo by Karolina Grabowska / Pexels.com From the missing work of Sappho to Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page, stream-of-consciousness novel Ducks, Newburyport, our columnist considers the linguistic,…
Photo of Barcelona by ikuday / Stock.adobe.com My amada and I arrived in Barcelona from Paris. We saw from the start the two cities have much in common. Both went through architectural reorganizat…
As someone who writes nonfiction, poetry, and songs based on my own realities, I am amazed by the fiction writer’s capacity to create worlds. In the books that follow, the authors seamlessly weave res…