Photo: Flickr.com/people/nex230Do we need a special issue devoted solely to women writers? Indeed we do. Author and translator Alison Anderson explains why.Do we still need magazines…
ESSAYS
Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir, Snow Symbol I, 2015, 100 x 100 cm, oil on linen. Photo by Pétur Thomsen.In these philosophical meditations for a Reykjavík art exhibit, Icelandic author Oddný Eir looks int…
Made of iron, this scold’s bridle from Belgium dates from the 16th or 17th century. The strut of metal that went into the wearer’s mouth to hold down her tongue has broken off.If there’s…
Photo by Kevin LauThe following essay argues for the importance of shifting world literature courses away from “survey” and toward the interrogation of categories of knowledge that typica…
Tesla owns the expertise on electric cars, Picasso on cubism, and the Neustadt Prize on casting a large net to evaluate international literature in unbiased fashion. And in so doing, the…
An artist adds color to a building in a Delhi alleyway. Photo by Vikram Singh.The twenty-first century has seen Delhi go from being just another nondescript capital city to a throbbing me…
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran FoerRecent fiction by Junot Díaz, Paul Kingsnorth, and Ali Smith offers an emergent project for contemporary world literature by yoking the histo…
Ghassan Zaqtan (left) and Mahmoud Darwish in a 2007 photo taken by Palestinian poet Bashir Shalash.After presenting a sweeping landscape of Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic days—w…
A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgress…
Members of the Sheffield, UK–based performance company Forced Entertainment on stage in And on the Thousandth Night at the Hebbel am Ufer performance center in Berlin. Photo: Hugo Glendin…
Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj created Unearthed (in Memoriam) (2014) out of repurposed book covers. He calls the work “a quiet gesture, an archive to remember those who have been forgo…
Photo by Raul LieberwirthThe great games will be remembered for a lifetime, just as we cannot give up on our failures, either. The muscles record the beautiful strokes; the possi…
After meeting at a short-fiction conference, Adnan Mahmutović and Lucy Durneen began talking to one another about his childhood love of comics and his efforts to preserve them during the Bosnian W…
The following excerpt is from The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, by Fernando Morais, forthcoming Verso Books (on sale wherever books are sold on June 16, 2015). Roberto Fernández Retamar…
Photo by Yuri NumerovWriters from those parts of the world where democracy has for too long remained an unfulfilled dream cannot be apolitical. Over the years, as media freedom a…
Photo by Neil CraverAndrés Felipe Solano tackles fiction in his novels and facts in his journalism—as a writer, he alternates between the real and the imaginary. Of course, that…
Photo by Francis Bijl/FlickrWorld culture today is developing amid expanding globalization, which means that national literatures appear to develop more and more similar features…
Bruno Montané Krebs.Photo by Esther TaboadaTo complement “Mapping Life through Poetry,” his interview that appears in the November 2014 print edition of WLT, Ryan Long offers the fol…
The opening lines of Lea Goldberg’s poem “A god once commanded us,” from Found in Translation: Modern Hebrew Poets (2006), tr. Robert Friend, ed. Gabriel Levin.Israeli poetry of prot…
Photo by Jonathan AdamiIn our hyperdigital era, mass reading events provide opportunities for human interactio…
Photo by Lotus Carroll/FlickrTo read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz Writin…
Illustration adapted from Nikki Pugh/FlickrWith bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria’s Secret in Pride and Prejudice…
Written in the wake of the Barcelona Olympics, Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang reflects the tensions of a culture straining against its minor status with aspirations toward a cosmopol…- Photo by luipermom/FlickrComputational reading puts us in touch with an exploratory way of engaging with language, with how we use words and how we arrive at their meanings. It i…
- In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legisl…