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For literary responses to COVID-19 from writers around the world, check out our Voices from the Pandemic series.
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The Indigenous Writing Project: Contemporary Guaraní Poetry

Image: Osvaldo Pitoe, Untitled (2020). Ink on paper.

Nonfiction by Elisa Taber

Ñe’ ẽ: An Introduction to Contemporary Guaraní Poetry

A real work of Amerindian literature makes perceptible another way of ordering and being in the world.

Poetry by Miguelángel Meza

Dawn

water boils up from grouped stones, grips me.

Translated from Guaraní by Tracy K. Lewis and Miguelángel Meza

bilingual

Poetry by Alba Eiragi Duarte

My Fire

At light of dawn I rise and make fire, / and dry in nascent fire-gleam the space where dew once pearled.

Translated from Guaraní by Tracy K. Lewis and Alba Eiragi Duarte

bilingual

Poetry by Susy Delgado

Our Father Is Tired

a dark stillness / goes about sowing death.

Translated from Guaraní by Susan Smith Nash and Susy Delgado

bilingual

Poetry by Alberto Luna

Serpent

I alone / plunge my roots / and outstretch my branches.

Translated from Guaraní by Susan Smith Nash and Susy Delgado

bilingual

feature

A Critic at Large: Maya Jaggi in Arequipa

Critic at Large by Maya Jaggi

White City Blues in Arequipa: Peru’s Writers Face the Legacies of Racism and Colonialism

Maya Jaggi

Voices from the Pandemic

Nonfiction by The Editors of Words Without Borders

Voices from the Pandemic: A New Series for These COVID-19 Times

Rome in the Midst of CoronavirusWords Without Borders launches a new series of literary responses to the COVID-19 crisis from around the world.

Fiction by Libuše Moníková

Pas de Deux

Being with you is like being on an island, a quarantine island.

Translated from German by Anne Posten

Poetry by Arlinda Guma

COVID-19

In Germany the statue of Marx is playing chess with the family doctor

Translated from Albanian by Peter Constantine

Nonfiction by Poupeh Missaghi

A Persian New Year Beginning with COVID-19

With the news coming out of Iran, I was already beginning to feel the weight of the ongoing disaster in my body.

WWB Daily

August 6th, 2020

Birds in Formation

by Nguyen Ngoc Tu 

Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, translated and edited by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock, is out this week from Columbia University Press. In…read more

August 4th, 2020

The City and the Writer: In Salerno with Giorgio Sica

by Nathalie Handal 

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo…read more

July 30th, 2020

“An Immigrant Like an Automobile”

by Malgorzata Szejnert 

From preeminent Polish journalist Malgorzata Szejnert, Ellis Island: A People's History, translated by Sean Gasper Bye and out next week with Scribe Publications, pieces together a…read more

July 28th, 2020

The Watchlist: July 2020

by Tobias Carroll 

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.  From Open Letter Books | This Could Have…read more

July 23rd, 2020

First Read—From “No Presents Please”

by Jayant Kaikini 

The first translated book to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Jayant Kaikini's No Presents Please, translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana and out next week with…read more

July 20th, 2020

“A Recurring Dream”: Moris Farhi, Erich Auerbach, and the Novelization of Turkish Jewry

by Matt Hanson 

In this essay, Matt Hanson explores how contemporary Turkish writers like Moris Farhi, Zulfu Livaneli, and Ayse Kulin continue to grapple with Turkey's complex relationship to…read more


Book Reviews

Humans Are the Ultimate Food Staple in Agustina Bazterrica’s Dystopian “Tender Is the Flesh”

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

After a fatal virus infects its livestock, a panicked nation is herded by political demagogues toward human slaughter and cannibalism in this disturbing Argentinian novel.

Machado de Assis Gains Different Voices in New Translations of “Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”

Reviewed by Charles A. Perrone

A deceased character writes his memoirs from beyond the grave in this sui generis classic by the Brazilian master, now published in two new editions that take divergent paths to convey its peculiar combination of "the pen of mirth" and "the ink of melancholy."

Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail” Caps Its Author’s Long Quest for a Language of Life Under Occupation

Reviewed by Mona Kareem

With every line of this laborious novel, the Palestinian writer explores how war and conflict occur on the level of narrative, history, and the individual psyche. The result is an accumulation of details that store the trauma of those whose screams hang in the air of the past.

Ha Seong-nan’s “Bluebeard’s First Wife” Gives the Old Tale of Patriarchy a New Twist

Reviewed by Hannah Weber

A crucial voice in the burgeoning movement of feminist fiction from South Korea, Ha is a master of atmospheric suspense whose stories use shock and horror to dissect contemporary gender-based violence and its historical roots.

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