Yassini Girls (Beacon Books, 2024), the new novel by Shereen Malherbe, invites readers into a rich and emotional narrative, weaving together the personal and the historical. Through the inter…

Five or six years ago, I was reading Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919–1990) with my Arabic teacher and thought of writing an article about him in English, but I found only one translation on Amazon. I was pu…

Caroline Cingria, C. F. Ramuz, pastel (1903) / Images courtesy of Noël CordonierLumen Obscurum Light and darkness are a major part of the global human experience; their contrast is a…

Photo of the author by Jeff Norman / ZeinaAzzam.comIn Zeina Azzam’s mesmerizing collection of poems Some Things Never Leave You (Tiger Bark Press, 2023), tenderness means gazing directly at w…

Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Fernando Vallejo’s The Abyss (New Directions, 2024) is reaching new audiences in Yvette Siegert’s updated English translation. Twenty-three years after it…

Gjekë Marinaj’s Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems, co-translated by the author and Frederick Turner (Syracuse University Press, 2023), marks the English debut of an Albanian-bor…

The first sentence of Janice Weizman’s The Wayward Moon (Toby Press, 2024) sets the stage with clarity and precision: “I, Rahel Bat Yair, was born in the city of Sura, which lies on the weste…

Photo of Diop by Gavyn Redd / Shevaun Williams PhotographyOn September 26, 2002, Le Joola, the passenger ship relaying Dakar to Ziguinchor in the south of Senegal, capsized on its way to Daka…

Covid-19 took the toll of over seven million lives globally since the pandemic began in late 2019. In the US alone the death toll estimate is more than a million. Yet this devastating tragedy has bee…

A recent Parisian exhibit about the pre-impressionists revealed that before painting techniques changed, artists abandoned heroic subjects and eternal, noble emotions to portray ordinary people and sc…

Photo by Shane LeonardAs I wrote in World Literature Today some years ago, the quality of Stephen King’s writing abilities are all too frequently underestimated because of his popularity and…

With its stunning wraparound cover, featuring a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, this edition of Raoul Vaneigem’s landmark Resistance to Christianity: A Chro…

Olivia Elias’s singular voice has not gone unnoticed in the Palestinian poetic landscape. A French-speaking poet and child of the Nakba, her work, published only since 2015, has already been picked up…

In the book dedicated to her sister Liliana, who was murdered at the age of twenty by her ex-boyfriend on July 16, 1990, Cristina Rivera Garza includes transcriptions of telephone int…

Todd Fredson’s translations of francophone African, specifically Ivorian, poetic voices over the past decade mark an important contribution to postcolonial and African studies, not to mention cultural…

There’s currently a surge of new novels in English by Punjabi authors. Interestingly, many of them, written by upper-caste individuals, depict the caste system and its abuses. Ujjal Dosanjh’s The…

In Redolent Rush, a recent short fiction collection published by Hawakal, based in New Delhi, India, we have nineteen short stories by Indian authors collected for the purpose of documenting…

I Narain’s home state of Uttar Pradesh / Reality Images / Adobe Stockt is a grim reality that many important Indian poets are not yet known by the anglophone readers spread across the globe, sadly, be…

In Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023), Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes an urgent tribute for Ukraine, the same urgency she employed when putting together her Ukraine antho…

  The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in…

There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable…

  Photo by Finan Akbar / UnsplashLife Ceremony (Grove Press, 2022) marks the third translation—once again expertly rendered into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori—of recent works by Sayaka Mur…

Roman floor mosaic with scene from the Odyssey / Photo by Jamie Heath / FlickrIn Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II (Palg…

Zuzanna Ginczanka in April 1938 / Muzeum Literatury / East NewsHistory displaced Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) from birth. Born in Kiev a few days after the outbreak of the October 1917 Bolshevik revo…

Edouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), oil on canvas, 252 × 305 cm, Kunsthalle Mannheim / WikipediaPerched grandly and Viennese-pretty on a rocky promontory just north…