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... January, 2020 On International Literature and Travel (Magazine) By The Editors of Words Without Borders | January 21, 2020 This month, we’re engaging one of the more pressing questions facing the literary sphere. Reading, it is commonly averred, can make us better versions of ourselves. Without ceding that notion, we ask a different version of it: can international literature make us better travelers? Our debate includes contributions from four writers who bring wildly different perspectives: M. Lynx Qualey writes about Arabic literature and translation issues; Tomaso Biancardi is an Italian editor and... We Usually Ask Literature to be Humanizing Only When It’s from “Over There” (Magazine) By M. Lynx Qualey | January 21, 2020 M. Lynx Qualey is the editor of ArabLit Quarterly. Should we, she asks, really place the onus for responsible travel on international literature—and can such literature even improve us as travelers? Mark Twain read Arabic literature. Not widely; there were no English translations of Twain’s Arab contemporaries circulating in the mid-1800s. He’d surely have loved the satiric, word-spinning work of Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq, had it been available. Some of the... The Reader’s Openness to the Unfamiliar (Magazine) By Emmanuel Iduma | January 21, 2020 In examining whether international literature can make us better travelers, Emmanuel Iduma, a writer who splits his time between Lagos and New York, takes a deep dive into the headwater of Igbo, his own estrangement from the language, and the intentions of writers and translators alike. The introductory paragraph of Omenuko, Pita Nwana’s 1933 novel, the first to be written in Igbo, reads as follows: N’akụkụ obodo anyị... On the “Good” in “Good Traveler” (Magazine) By Shahnaz Habib | January 21, 2020 Shahnaz Habib is the author of Airplane Mode, a forthcoming book of narrative nonfiction about the complexities of travel. Drawing on her own experiences abroad, she concludes that literature may, in fact, make us better travelers—but not necessarily in the way we think. Traveling someplace new is not easy. One thought that terrifies me when I find myself in a foreign place is that I might be spotted looking through a Lonely Planet. I stay safe by carrying only... The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature (Magazine) By Tomaso Biancardi | January 21, 2020 Tomaso Biancardi is coeditor of The Passenger, a new series of travel magazines in Italian and English that publish long-form essays, investigative journalism, literary reportage, and visual narratives in order to tell the story of a country or city and to portray its shifting culture and identity, its public debates, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, conflicts, and open wounds. Through the lens of his own move to Istanbul, Biancardi explores the... Words Without Borders Receives 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Grant (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | January 16, 2020 New York, New York, January 16, 2020—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday awards totaling more than $27 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2020, including an Art Works award to Words Without Borders to support its flagship online magazine of international literature, education programs, and events. The Art Works funding category supports projects that focus on public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across... First Read—From “The Sweet Indifference of the World” (WWB Daily) By Peter Stamm | January 15, 2020 In Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World, translated by Michael Hofmann and out next week with Other Press, a writer blurs the line between past and present, fiction and reality, in his attempt to outrun the unknown. In the excerpt below, the writer describes his first encounter with his double to a young woman, Lena, who herself seems to be the double of the writer’s former lover. I’m an actor too, said Lena. I know, I said. How do you know?... A Note from the Editors: January 2020 (Magazine) By The Editors of Words Without Borders | January 15, 2020 This month, Words Without Borders brings readers a selection of poetry translated from Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect spoken in Rojava. The autonomous Kurdish region of Syria has been in the news in recent months after the removal of US military units stationed there and Turkey’s subsequent invasion. Throughout its history, Words Without Borders has advocated for increased access to writing from around the world in English translation. We exist for writers and... Beyond the Headlines: Poetry from Rojava (Magazine) By David Shook | January 15, 2020 By the time I moved to South Kurdistan in the late summer of 2018, I had been watching the development of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), commonly known internationally by its Kurdish name, Rojava, for several years. Like many others, I was excited to see how its libertarian socialist government would take shape, and inspired by its publicly declared values of gender equality, environmental sustainability, and pluralism. As a poet and translator, I was eager to... [Only the madman has stayed behind in the city] (Magazine) By Ciwan Nebî | January 15, 2020 An abandoned city’s lone inhabitant rages against his surroundings and those who left in this poem by Ciwan Nebî. Only the madman has stayed behind in the city, Barefoot On cold nights Shots can be heard! What does he have to fear? He has no kin, No kingdom but the city. He’ll resort to anything! He calls out to those who have abandoned the city As if they took what’s left of his mind with them, and all his cigarettes! He calls out in the rain, Staring at the... [I needed to wake up at 3:00 in the morning to make it to work] (Magazine) By Ciwan Qado | January 15, 2020 In two poems, Ciwan Qado reflects on relentless poverty and longs for relief from the worries of adult life. I needed to wake up at 3:00 in the morning to make it to work I said to myself, you can't go to work—you haven’t slept Either sleep and don’t go to work Or don't sleep but still don’t go to work. I proceeded with caution Like a marble inching toward the line I opened my eyes. The rain drizzled down. Inside my head, a sound like banging the... [I speak to] (Magazine) By Cihan Hesen | January 15, 2020 Loneliness proves insurmountable in this haunting poem by Cihan Hesen. I speak to The corpse of a dead poem I speak to The skin of the night I speak to The bare fingernails of my weak hands I speak to The broken mirror in my dark and empty room I speak to Your orderly books I speak to Loneliness I speak to The loneliness of my long shadow But the hush feeling, silence sullen-faced fate reaches my ears I too fall silent in the fire of silence © Cihan Hesen. By arrangement with... Zeruya Shalev Connects Private Woes with Political Strife in “Pain” (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Yael Halevi-Wise | January 14, 2020 In a 2007 interview with journalist Rochelle Furstenberg, Zeruya Shalev said that her writing seeks “the opposite of the public domain. I want to capture the nuances of the inner life.” This assertion notwithstanding, her sixth novel, Pain, wades into contemporary Middle Eastern politics to establish a rather problematic comparison between the pain caused by a terrorist act and the trauma caused when naïve illusions of perfect love are destroyed. Shalev brings these two... The City and the Writer: In Toledo, Ohio with Charles Kell (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | January 14, 2020 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 Toledo as you feel/see it? Toledo, Ohio is known as “The Glass City” for its manufacturing and large-scale production of glass... Road Stories: International Writing on Travel (Magazine) By Susan Harris | January 6, 2020 In a way, every literary work is a travel story. Readers seek to be transported; authors oblige, serving as guides through unfamiliar territory, charting characters’ journeys through setting and plot. Reading in translation offers enhanced vicarious travel, in that the translator has navigated not only a text but a language, reporting back in the form of a new rendition. This month we’ve traveled back in time and through our archives to bring you compelling tales of... December, 2019 The Watchlist: December 2019 (WWB Daily) By Tobias Carroll | December 23, 2019 Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Grove Atlantic | The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman | Fiction | 192 pages | ISBN 9780802147516 | US$16.00 What the publisher says: “From one of India’s best-known writers and the author of the National Book Award–longlisted One Part Woman comes a... Our Favorite International Reads from 2019 (and What We’ll Be Reading in 2020) (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | December 20, 2019 As the year draws to a close, our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite works-in-translation of 2019 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2020. Eric M. B. Becker Editor To pick a favorite read is well near impossible, so I’d like to suggest a book that is both excellent and timely: Eliane Brum’s The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections (Graywolf Press), translated by... “Space Invaders,” by Nona Fernández, Looks Back at the Unspoken Terrors of Pinochet’s Chile (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado | December 18, 2019 As I write this review, Chileans are on the streets, dealing once again with the limits and injustices of the neoliberal model, first imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and currently advanced by the government of right-wing president Sebastián Piñera. As people hit the streets, fed up with decades of policies that have intensified class inequalities across the country, the fiction of Chile as a model of free-market success and democratic neoliberalism is... The Best Translated Books You Missed in 2019 (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | December 17, 2019 As we approach the end of the year, we’ve been speaking with translators, critics, publishers, writers, and booksellers about excellent works in translation that you may have missed in your 2019 reading. Margaret Busby, Edwin Frank, Ru Freeman, Gregory Pardlo, and more recommend works that they feel are deserving of greater attention. The Scent of Buenos Aires and Parade Recommended by Esther Allen Hebe Uhart is a true writer’s writer; much... 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. Page 1 of 215 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›
