July, 2018 After Midnight (Magazine) By Charles Chahwan | July 1, 2018 Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence. Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential... December, 2019 Translating the Real J. P. Cuenca: An Essay and Interview (WWB Daily) By Elizabeth Lowe | December 12, 2019 Elizabeth Lowe’s translation of an excerpt from Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca’s I Found Out I Was Dead appears in the current issue of international true crime writing. Lowe reflects on the transnational nature of Cuenca’s work and interviews the writer. João Paulo Cuenca is a child of the Brazilian dictatorship in the sense that his writing reflects the experience of that dark period in the lives of Brazilians. His... First Read—From “Come to Me” (WWB Daily) By Bogdan Rusev | December 11, 2019 Bogdan Rusev’s Come to Me, translated by Ekaterina Petrova and out next week with Dalkey Archive Press, is a story of coming-of-age in 1990s Bulgaria in the wake of the Soviet Bloc’s collapse and the country’s transition to a parliamentary democracy. In the excerpt below, the narrator revisits the tales of his family’s past. My father says he named me the way he did because back when I was born, that was the only way to get the communist authorities to... Forced Confessions: On True Crime Writing (Magazine) By Susan Harris | December 3, 2019 I confess: my guilty pleasure is true crime. It started, appropriately, with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas family, which I discovered at the formative age of ten. I read it sitting up in a bed that felt progressively less secure, in my parents’ creaking, groaning old house, just one state over from the gruesome events. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever slept through the night in that house again. I was... The Sixth Victim (Magazine) By Shōko Egawa | December 3, 2019 A cheating husband, a jealous wife, and a suspicious bottle of wine turn a celebratory dinner into a tragedy in this excerpt from Shōko Egawa’s “The Sixth Victim.” At the border between Mie and Nara prefectures is an area called Kuzuo. Kuzuo had once been a single village, but it was split in two when Japan’s feudal domains came to an end during the Meiji period. The part of Kuzuo now located in Mie is called Nabari. It’s also known as Iga Kuzuo.... St. Barbara (Graphic Lit) By Marek Šindelka and Vojtěch Mašek and Marek Pokorný | December 3, 2019 It's not your job to solve this case. I Found Out I Was Dead (Magazine) By João Paulo Cuenca | December 3, 2019 After learning that he is officially dead, Brazilian writer J. P. Cuenca tries to understand who stole his identity and why. A dead man’s greatest virtue is honesty. —Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas I found out I was dead when I started to write a book. It wasn’t this book yet. I was living with my wife in an apartment two floors above a restaurant. The kitchen staff would get together on the restaurant’s back... Factproof (Graphic Lit) By Jake Raynal | December 3, 2019 Like most gruesome crimes, the case also reveals something of society’s ills. The Pain of Others (Magazine) By Miguel Ángel Hernández | December 3, 2019 When he runs into an old friend, Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Hernández is forced to revisit the shocking 1995 murder-suicide of his best friend. They went into Rosario’s house, your father says from the next room, killed Rosi and took Nicolás. It’s the first thing you hear. The voice that wakes you up. The sentence you’ll never be able to forget. For a second, you prefer to think that it’s part of a dream, so you stay completely still beneath... Lusia Murdered (Magazine) By Cezary Łazarewicz | December 3, 2019 A woman remains suspiciously calm in the face of her stepdaughter’s violent death in Cezary Łazarewicz’s reimagining of a 1931 murder. Brzuchowice, night of Wednesday to Thursday, December 30–31, 1931 It hurtles out of the darkness, flying straight at him. It’s small and bursts with color. The engineer’s clouded mind tells him it’s a hummingbird. He saw one like it in some book. Maybe in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s encyclopedia? It has... Massacre in the Pacific: A Personal Account (Magazine) By Du Qiang | December 3, 2019 A Chinese fishing expedition devolves into a mutinous bloodbath in “Massacre in the Pacific,” reporter Du Qiang’s interview with one of the few crew members who made it home alive. The Lurongyu 2682, which belonged to the Rongcheng Aquatic Product Company of Shandong Province, was a squid-jigging vessel measuring thirty to forty meters long and with a 330 kW power engine. In December 2010, it set off to fish for squid off the coast of Chile and Peru, with a crew of... Your Holiday Gift Guide to Reading in Translation (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | December 2, 2019 This holiday season give friends and family the gift of literature from around the world. Here are our recommendations of exciting recent international titles for all of the readers in your life. Art enthusiasts will relish María Gainza’s Optic Nerve (tr. Thomas Bunstead, Catapult), which blends episodes in art history with the narrator’s life in contemporary Buenos Aires; or Geometry of Shadows, poetry by Italian Metaphysical painter Giorgio de... November, 2019 Exploring Italian Language, Rap, and Migration through Translation (WWB Daily) By Donatella Melucci | November 29, 2019 In my Italian translation course at Georgetown University, advanced students of Italian learn about translation theory and practice (English-Italian, and vice versa) of different genres, including newspaper articles, short stories, cartoons, novels, biographies, songs, movie scripts, and subtitles. It is a popular course in which students master their skills in reading, comprehension, and writing. Of course, class discussion is always in Italian, so their speaking ability is... The City and the Writer: In Vicenza with Carlo Pizzati (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | November 27, 2019 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 Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Vicenza as you feel/see it? The mood in Vicenza is at once melancholic, serene, provincial, and contemplative. There’s enough emptiness in the slowed time of Vicenza to allow room for serenity. Or you might find... The Watchlist: November 2019 (WWB Daily) By Tobias Carroll | November 21, 2019 Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Feminist Press | The Living Days by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman | Fiction | 174 pages | ISBN 9781936932702 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old white British spinster, and Cub,... Writing From Elsewhere: A Timely Anthology Collects Tales of Displacement and Resettlement (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Hannah Weber | November 15, 2019 To anyone who regularly gets stuck in the news cycle, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature may seem somewhat overdue. Migration issues have received an increasing amount of media coverage over the past several years, often within a context of violence and disasters, as the number of refugees and asylum seekers worldwide hit record highs. Stories of migration are usually presented using imagery meant to provoke strong, and often contradictory, emotional responses. The picture... One Day in August a Man Disappeared—A Multilingual Most Exquisite Corpse Story (WWB Daily) By Andrés Barba, Kirmen Uribe, Jeremy Tiang, and Kira Josefsson | November 13, 2019 At PEN America’s Lit Crawl NYC 2019, Words Without Borders and SLICE Literary partnered to present a multilingual exquisite corpse, a story authored by four international writers and their translators. In the exquisite corpse tradition, one writer penned the first segment of the story (in this case, Spanish writer Andrés Barba, who was given a prompt line from Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, translated by E. Dale... The City and the Writer: In Amman with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | November 11, 2019 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 Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Amman as you feel/see it? Amman has a nervous energy—it’s busy and ambitious and wants to punch above its weight, and there are always new projects and strange dreams unfolding on one hill while on the neighboring hill the... Telling Truths with New Words: Jeffrey Zuckerman on Translating Mauritian Literature (WWB Daily) By Ariel Saramandi | November 7, 2019 Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translations of Ananda Devi’s The Living Days (The Feminist Press) and Shenaz Patel’s Silence of the Chagos (Restless Books) were both released this week. Through this work (and the magic of Twitter) he became friends with Mauritian writer Ariel Saramandi, and the two spoke about how he came to translate Devi’s work and the particularities of translating Francophone Mauritian literature. Ariel Saramandi (AS): It was back in 2016, while... First Read—From “Return to the Enchanted Island” (WWB Daily) By Johary Ravaloson | November 4, 2019 In Johary Ravaloson’s Return to the Enchanted Island, translated by Allison M. Charette and out tomorrow with Amazon Crossing, Ietsy Razak comes of age amidst the enchanted origin myths of Madagascar. On Tuesday, November 12, Johary Ravaloson and Allison M. Charette will be in conversation with Uzodinma Iweala for the book’s launch at POWERHOUSE Arena in Brooklyn, NY. Ietsy dreamed that she would bring him with her in her purse along with all the other objects... (Re)writing the Philippines: An Introduction (Magazine) By Kristian Sendon Cordero and Kristine Ong Muslim | November 1, 2019 The year 2021 will mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in the Philippine Islands, an event associated with the first circumnavigation of the world, led by Ferdinand Magellan. Both historical points launched the mapping and invasion of many parts of the archipelago for more than three hundred years, followed by an American invasion that has furthered the country’s long, tragic history of coming under the rule of one colonial power after another while... Other Lives, Other Worlds (Magazine) By Susan Harris | November 1, 2019 We’ve marked this season in previous years by bringing you ghost stories and tales of mourning. This year, we’re exploring excursions into the otherworldly: that liminal space where lives and afterlives mingle and merge and the quotidian gives rise to the extraordinary. The three pieces here portray characters meeting emissaries from realms beyond our own. A detective cracks a case with not-quite-earthly help; a relentless double trails an increasingly frustrated original;... The Checkers Player (Magazine) By Ada Rémy and Yves Rémy | November 1, 2019 A game of checkers has life-and-death consequences in this short story by Ada Rémy and Yves Rémy. General Arthur Shine-Levis tells his friends he fought eight battles during the campaign of Winter ’44 to Spring ’45. Eight times over, he emerged victorious. “Because I’m a solid checkers player,” he adds. He is entreated to explain himself. He obliges. “It was the eve of my first battle. A quiet night. Not a whisper in camp, just the... from “Remains” (Magazine) By Daryll Delgado | November 1, 2019 In this short story by Daryll Delgado, a devastating typhoon unearths an unexpected childhood memory. Masasarop an baha, pero diri an baba. The flood may be contained, but never the mouth. —Waray proverb “. . . it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.” —John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet: A Story of Crossing Paths “Less than 12 hours from a devastating... Juan Manuel’s Shadow (Magazine) By Robert Marcuse | November 1, 2019 In this short story by Robert Marcuse, a man attempts to rid himself of his own shadow. When a man looks at his shadow, it’s because he’s thinking about something else: he looks at it without seeing it, lost in thought, and his gaze barely touches it. We’ve lived with our shadows so long that they no longer attract our attention. They’re withdrawn and rather mysterious beings often hiding just behind us, or they peek out from the soles of our shoes. They... Page 1 of 214 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›
