Photo © Keiko Onoda
BIRDS CHIRP AND MIGRATE. Rivers flow. People die. Snow falls. Many people know about the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. None of these singular thi…
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There’s never enough space to cover them all, but in an effort to account for as many titles as possible, here are thirteen 2021 translations for your reading list, including novels, nonfiction, p…
Photo by Trevor Vannoy on Unsplash THE CITY—rainy, with moody skies and smoke rising from the rooftops—gazes at the yawning lake that protects her, as if searching for someth…
BOOKSTORES ARE OFTEN pegged as refuges, sanctuaries, havens, and the like, but they behave more accurately like consulates. With their filing systems, scuttling attendants, and all…
Photo by Natalya Y. on Unsplash A Bosnian Swedish writer considers how extreme nuances and barely perceptible differences, which signify no change in the core meaning of a word, still evo…
Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash ANDREA TOMPA’S WORK, as a theater critic and public intellectual, has been an inspiration for me for years, and I am delighted to bring her m…
IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I ha…
SINCE THE MILLENNIUM, the availability of English translations of Icelandic literature has grown exponentially. It is impossible to dismiss the effect of Nordic Noir in this developme…
Photo by Victor Malyushev on Unsplash AFTER A HIATUS since my student days in the early 1970s, I’ve been living in Vienna again since 2006. That year I became immersed in a V…
Ropa vieja photo / Courtesy of Doña Eutimia YOU HAVE TO WALK TOWARD THE Callejón del Chorro, alongside the Cathedral of San Cristóbal in Old Havana, to get to Doña Eutimia. T…
IN HER FOREWORD to The Town Slowly Empties (Headpress, 2021), Sasha Dugdale describes this slim hybrid as the author’s “lyrical diary of lock…
Photo by David Norman / Unsplash A writer with Scottish ancestry traces the life of Scottish Gaelic and assesses the current state of this “intangible heritage” now placed at the center o…
Photo by Wendy Tanner / Flickr THE PEOPLE IN DIAA JUBAILI’S STORIES have a confounding habit of turning themselves into other things: a eucalyptus tree, a dung beetle, a ligh…
WHEN LYDIA DAVIS WON the Man Booker International prize in 2013, flash fiction made it into the sitting room of the house of fiction. Not just flash fiction collections appeare…
SOUTH ASIA—which, per the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation definition, includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Mal…
Photo by Artur Kraft / Unsplash GLASGOW IS NOT SO MUCH OF A CITY of books as a city of stories and storytellers. In the years I lived there, the stories I heard reflecte…
Photo by Hussein Alazaat IN THE BONE-CRACKING ARIDITY of Jordan, civilizations are still born from, and borne upon, water. On the poppling wellsprings found on the hills and…
NICK KARY’S MATERIAL (Chelsea Green, 2020) uses the narrative tools of the psychogeographer to map the flows from human needs to the natural environment as…
Photo by Tim Mossholder / Unsplash What is the difference between an o and an e in Spanish? For 51.06 percent of Argentina’s population, everything. I rememb…
I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government. The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little…
We love new-translation news. Here, WLT intern Alex Crayon offers four new translations—from Spanish, Korean, French, and Catalan—all releasing in February 2021. Mer…
Illustration by Chloe Cushman / All Saints’ Mountain by Olga Tokarsczuk POLISH SPECULATIVE FICTION in English is easy to find, if you know where to look: Twisted Spo…
Photos by SarahBelle Selig THE WIND KEEPS THE CITY in motion. The pine trees grow sideways away from the peaks, bowed seaward by the southeasterly. It snaps you to attention,…
Photo: Joey Wilson / Courtesy of AWAACC LOCATED IN THE HEART of downtown Pittsburgh, on Liberty Avenue close to Union Station and the David Lawrence Convention Center, the sleek and elegant b…
During quarantine, when not watching the news or reading a novel, I find my daily vision drawn to immediate surroundings: geese touching down in the parking lot where we safely walk (no need to come w…