Yu Miri / Courtesy of Zoom Japan Yu Miri first started researching the evictions of the homeless community in Tokyo’s Ueno Park back in 2006. Days or even hours before visits by the emperor and the i…

Under the repressive regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, any work that even hinted at criticism of the state would result in severe punishment for the offending culprit. How Captiv…

Roberto Fernández Retamar in 2015,illustration by Michael Hoeweler. This started out as a book review of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Poesía nueva reunida (Letras Cubanas and Ediciones Unión,…

News, Reviews, and Interviews The new issue of Poetry International is now available. The double issue features poems by current Neustadt nominee Carolyn Forché; Neustadt laureates Tomas Tranströmer a…

  From Grimm’s Fairy Tales, translated from the German by Margaret Hunt, illustrated by John B. Gruelle (Cupples & Leon, 1914). A review of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Br…

Alan Cheuse by Josh Cheuse | Courtesy of NPR The editors of WLT were deeply saddened to hear the news of Alan Cheuse’s passing last week at the age of seventy-five. Dr. Cheuse s…

A Warm Welcome to WLT’s New Book Review Editor, Rob Vollmar Rob Vollmar and Marla Johnson The editors of World Literature Today each have a colored editing pencil: mine is purple, o…

Zoran Živković’s Hidden Camera (translated by Alice Copple-Tošić) unfolds within that indefinite space between dream and reality. Upon receiving a mysterious film-screening invitatio…

Last week, we said farväl to our beloved book review editor, Marla Johnson, who retired after working at World Literature Today since 1992. For more than twenty years, Marla worked (…

News, Reviews, and Interviews Up at Words Without Borders this week, Suzanne Jill Levine remembers all of the times she sat down to dinner with Pablo Neruda over his lifetime…

Photo by Zeynel Abidin Turkish writer Elif Shafak conquers the task of crossing both cultures and genders in her latest novel, The Architect’s Apprentice (London: Viking, 2014), in which she…

A Review of Ancestral Intelligence, by Vera Schwarcz (Atrium House, 2013) Photo by Eki Ramadhan 1 Where thought could not be free,Death was a more…

Portrait of Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) by A. Ferrazzi(Casa Leopardi, Recanati, Italy, 1820). Source: Wikipedia. A review of Zibaldone, by Giacomo Leopardi. Ed. Michael Caesar…

“Perhaps this approach to discussing the art of translation is not very different from the tradition of midrash, where the holy book is revisited again and again, so the years bring only more rich…

While you’re browsing through this week’s set of lit links, we would really appreciate your help. We are currently in the running for ASME’s Best Cover Contest and need votes to win! All you have to d…

“There was the music and the clutter of voices from the big house, and the wind shoving and pulling at them, and she thought, I want this, I know I want this. This is how you get from one world to the…

A Short Tale of ShameAngel Igov tr. Angela Rodel Open Letter, 2013 A Short Tale of Shame is the first full-length novel from Bulgarian short-story writer and critic Angel Igo…

This week’s links are full of linguistic appeal—dig into our literary finds, including pieces on translation, multilingual education, and poetry. News, Reviews, and Interviews Stork P…

We are getting ready for our holiday break at WLT, wrapping up our year and tying up all the loose ends. As we prepare to go out the door and lock up the office until next year, we want to le…