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…
Varia
“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…
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…
Photo courtesy of Sholeh Wolpé “Much of the most interesting postrevolutionary fiction being written in Persian is by women, and Shahrnush Parsipur is one of the bright lights among them. First is…
Photo courtesy of Second Story Books, Washington, DC / secondstorybooks.com In a world where literature and politics collide, Second Story Books fits perfectly in the middle of it all. With…
I’m worried for us. Humanity is on a collision course with annihilation, and most people don’t seem terribly bothered. Granted, we’re a species hardwired to survive and don’t like to look at our demis…
Photo by ink drop / Stock.adobe.com Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in…
Photo of Bordeaux, France by JackF / Stock.adobe.com In December 1801 the poet Friedrich Hölderlin accepted a position as tutor at the Bordeaux residence of German wine merchant Daniel Christoph M…
Photo by Sergi Reboredo / Alamy Stock Photo Escaping the Khmer Rouge, Chantha Nguon’s family moved to Saigon, where they lived as refugees. There, restoring flavor to the drab palate of their l…
Photo courtesy of Victor Adewale / OlongoAfrica “This distinguished Nigerian playwright’s account [Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died] of his prolonged season in hell as a detainee of the Federal Governm…
Photo courtesy of Søren Solkær, Black Sun #149, Rome, Italy We could not resist sharing this remarkable photograph. Søren Solkær (b. 1969) is a Danish photographer. After completing his d…
Photo of Oklahoma City by Gerson Repreza / Unsplash.com A cliché about Oklahoma City and Oklahoma in the national imagination is that it is a place to be passed through. In stories of th…
Photo by Reiseuhu and Katia De Juan / Unsplash.com Literature can change the way we celebrate. The bull-running and fighting of Spain’s San Fermin festival was just a local affair before Hemingway…
No sense can be made of the unspeakable horrors and injustices Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to over the course of the last few months—to say nothing of the last century.…
Photos of Handley Cellars Painted Mural at the AV Historical Museum courtesy of Courtney DeGraff / Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association / avwines.com In her column for this issue, Veronica…
“This article began with a zombie. Had it not been for the zombie, I wouldn’t have opened the way I did, nor said what I am about to say, nor compared what I am about to compare. I would have written…
Photos by Laura Hernandez Nestled on a quiet street in the Cordón neighborhood of Montevideo, Uruguay, is Escaramuza, a combination bookstore, café, and cultural events center. With ornate tile fl…