Readers of Natalia Ginzburg’s masterful autobiographical novel Family Lexicon (1963; Eng. 2017) will welcome New Directions’ 2019 reissues of her novels The Dry Heart (1947; Eng. 19…
Book Reviews
August 21, 2019
August 20, 2019Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 CE), “How to Read” 論語集注, in Sishu jizhu 四書集注, Sibu beiyao edition (National University of Singapore) In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton Un…
August 12, 2019Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers of ori…
July 24, 2019Amit Chaudhuri. Photo by Geoff Pugh. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (New York Review Books, 2019), follows a version of the author in the years prior to the book’s public…
July 18, 2019Photo by Ethan Chiang / Flickr Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology (Cambria Press, 2018) is a collection of short stories in translation featuring contemporary Taiwanese aut…
July 3, 2019Ever since early Islam, Jews have been dubbed the people of the book. The title stuck in European lands too, a deferential nod to the role of the Hebrew Bible in the Western canon, the breadth of Jew…
June 27, 2019Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Ghazal Cosmopolitan: The Culture and Craft of the Ghazal (Jacar Press, 2017), a melding of personal and craft essays, qasidas, and, of course, ghazals, functions as a k…
June 13, 2019Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.…
June 4, 2019Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a woman con…
May 30, 2019Photo: Greenwich Photography / Flickr The title of Ognjen Spahić’s Head Full of Joy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), which won the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature, underscores its brut…
May 28, 2019Photo by Eirik Newth / Flickr In late 2018, India’s highest literary honor was awarded to Anees Salim’s fourth novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants (Penguin India, 2015). The novel i…
May 21, 2019Stare Dam, a small loch located on the southern edge of Birnam Wood in Central Perth and Kinross, Scotland / Photo by ShinyPhotoScotland / Flickr José Manuel Cardona’s collection Birnam Wood / El…
April 18, 2019Carne de mi carne: Antología de cuento (Plural Editores, 2018; Flesh of my flesh: Short-story anthology), is a collection of short stories inspired by the philosophical underpinnings of Mary…
March 12, 2019Sylvia Plath standing beside her bicycle, Marblehead, Massachusetts, July 24, 1951. Plath, who was eighteen at the time, and her Smith College roommate, Marcia Brown (later Marcia B. Stern), served a…
February 12, 2019Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash Through a wealth of examples across disciplines, from novels, and from personal experience, Svend Erik Larsen’s Literature and the Experience of Globalization…
January 31, 2019Photo by Martin Lewison / Flickr When Convenience Store Woman came out in 2016, Murata Sayaka (b. 1979) won the Akutagawa Prize, usually the imprimatur of potential for a new writer. This wa…
January 15, 2019Loretta Collins Klobah / Courtesy of Peepal Tree Loretta Collins Klobah’s Ricantations (Peepal Tree, 2018) is her second collection of poetry. The book has been selected as a Poetry Book Soc…
January 10, 2019Enrapture Captivating Media / Unsplash What becomes a legend most? Great talent, suffering, and mystery . . . three ingredients that French poet Arthur Rimbaud possessed in spades. General readers wi…
January 7, 2019Michael Bazzett / Courtesy of Milkweed Editions and the Star Tribune Long overdue, Michael Bazzett’s verse translation of The Popol Vuh (Milkweed Editions, 2018) does for the Mayan creation…
December 18, 2018Photo by Eran Finkle / Flickr Jeff Talarigo’s third book, In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees (Etruscan Press, 2018), offers a compelling assessment of the collective psychological state of…
November 20, 2018Photo by jplenio / Pixabay “Acknowledging my illness,” writes Melyssa A. Harmon in Flecks of Red (Nautical Life Press, 2018), “allows me to take emotional ownership of all that comes with it…
September 18, 2018Background photo by tsauquet / Pixabay Genre is the most significant category in which books trade on the literary marketplace. Nonfiction or fiction. Memoir or novel. Literary fiction or romance, ho…
September 11, 2018Photo: Jarle Vines Norway is a country that shows up on the stage of Weltliteratur quite regularly. Henrik Ibsen had to live for more than two decades abroad to find the Archimedean point ne…
August 23, 2018Orientalism is over. The era of our culture, history, and image being constructed, codified, and represented by Western scholars is gone. Today we tell our own stories and are given voice by our own…
July 24, 2018Aside from romance, horror is perhaps the least globally diverse genre of popular fiction by measure of the authors writing in or translated to English. While film seems to have no trouble making hor…
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Photo by Daria ShchukinaUniversity of Oklahoma student Daria Shchukina recounts her recent trip to the 2024 ALTA conference and the impact it…
In June 2024 Pantheon published Tehrangeles, Porochista Khakpour’s latest novel (see WLT, Sept. 2024, 73). The novel satirizes…
Next Wednesday, November 13 at 4:00 pm cst, the University of Oklahoma’s Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies will host the…
