Translated literature is for grown-ups—or so goes conventional anglophone wisdom. And yet there are excellent translated titles available for younger readers, offering them a broader literary pala…
Varia
It’s the holiday season, and whether you’re shopping for Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Christmas, WLT has a new book for every reader on your list. For the ActivistJuliana Spahr…
What distinguishes the modern surveillance-and-control state from its predecessors is technodeterminism: the use of algorithms, not human beings, to monitor and shape citizens’ attitudes and behavior.…
For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao YiwuNew Harvest, 2013Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu J…
In the print edition of WLT, I recommended LGBT books with a political slant. These books reflect the importance of our role as artists. At the intersection of art and sexuality, art must tru…- Not far from 23rd and L, where the hotel Havana Libre, the Yara movie theater, and the popular Coppelia ice cream parlor converge, Eliezer Jiménez’s bookshop offers a vast selection of books to curiou…
The Bridge of BeyondSimone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childh…- Lara Candland and Christian Asplund. Photo: Curtis Asplund“World music” has become part of an advertising lexicon promising the buyer of CDs entrée into unfamiliar conventions. The operatic creations…
More than a century after the abolition of slavery, the market for human beings is alive and well. From violent abductions and the sale of family members to voluntary…
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David SedarisLittle, Brown, 2013 In David Sedaris’s new collection, the essays begin with a visit to his Parisian dentist and end with his first…- Photo by Somak Sarkar. West Bengali singer-songwriter-politician Kabir Suman.Go look up “Bangladesh” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Hmm. There is an entry for “Benga…
Writers of narrative or creative nonfiction often “immerse” themselves in places or with subjects for long periods in order to write about subjects intimately and in-depth. But due to familial res…
The Sarabande of Sara’s Band by Larysa DenysenkoMichael M. Naydan & Svitlana Bednazh, tr. Glagoslav Publications, 2013The familiar quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “H…- Inuit solo throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis. Photo: Sarah RaceThe Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic share an ancient form of music called katajjait (throat sin…
A friend recently came across a book review that described my novel, The Darlings, as a “financial thriller.” She wrinkled her nose. “Financial thriller?” s…
Angela Rodel, tr. Open Letter Books, 2013“I believe that the longer I keep the shutter open the more life gets captured on the negative.”Bulgarian-born novelist and playwright Zachary Ka…
Testimonial narrative is at once a discrete literary genre and an acknowledgment of the limits of literature itself. Rather than evoking oppression and brutality as fiction might, testimonial lite…
In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern, W. W. Norton, 2012In “Four Crises,” an essay in his 2012 collection Stealing History, Gerald Stern writes: “Humans, because of their minds,…- History is usually about the “big picture”: geopolitics, religious change, social movements. Sometimes, it’s about the “little picture” and called “everyday.” I like the latter—the story of how pe…
- About her mixed-genre recommendations, Giannina Braschi says, “I am always looking for originality. And originality is going back to the origin and finding an empty chair. Would you gladly sit on…
- If poets as far-flung as France, Cuba, India, and Nicaragua comprised the avant-garde of literary modernism, a lookout in a turret in Chicago, Illinois, saw the invasion coming to America and, instead…
- Whether seeking upward mobility, pursuing adventure, or escaping war, the characters in these migration narratives unsettle myths and demonstrate how geographic shifts impact everything from ident…
- Krys Lee’s new collection of short stories, Drifting House, is a stirring debut that propels Korean literature further into a modern era of postnational themes. Lee’s characters are not heroe…
- Angharad PriceThe Life of Rebecca JonesLloyd Jones, tr.MacLehose PressWelsh author Angharad Price offers us a welcome respite from our frenzied twenty-first-century lives in her absorbi…
- Combining memoir, history, and political analysis, Nikolaos van Dam’s recommended books both bring to life the day-to-day struggles of a single family and provide broader insight into Syria today.…