From epic sagas of the thirteenth century to modern crime fiction, Icelandic literature has something for everyone. Despite the country’s small population, Iceland has a rich literary culture and a t…

Alif. Photo by Tony Elieh. To celebrate the release of Alif’s Aynama-Rtama (reviewed in WLT’s inaugural World Music column here), we’ve put together a short but substantive playli…

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…

Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson, is a pairing of two witty, charming protagonists: Renée, a fifty-four-year-old con…

Photos by Jen Rickard Blair We’ve all come across books marked up by some fiend with no appreciation for the sanctity of the written word. Senseless underlining of unremarkable sentences, pedantic not…

“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…

“They say time finds you out, don’t they?”– The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a quiet sort of novel. His narrator introsp…

From the poets of princes known as Beirdd y Tywysogion to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the history, mythology, and landscape of Wales—and her border collies—have inspired generati…