All Articles by Date

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 the story below, "Birds in Formation" by popular Vietnamese writer Nguyen Ngoc Tu, two cousins find their relationship upended by the discovery of their parents' roles in the Vietnam War.   It was a day in October, around noon, and we had both skipped our midday nap, like...

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 Salerno as you feel/see it? The mood of my hometown is quite weird. Like many little cities of southern Italy, Salerno is stuck in a kind of medieval heritage, which is not just architectural, but mostly a way of living. We never got...

Maya Jaggi visited the colonial “White City” of Arequipa, Mario Vargas Llosa’s birthplace, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking to Peruvian writers then, and again under lockdown, WWB’s Critic at Large discovers how literature has reflected deep racial and regional divisions in the country. The armed conflict of 1980–2000 widened those rifts, laying bare inequalities that are resurfacing with the coronavirus. Yet writers, she argues in this long read, have...

A woman is nursed back to health by an acquaintance in this excerpt of Libuše Moníková's Verklärte Nacht, forthcoming next year from Karolinum Press. The man is back, trying to be quiet. I watch him, he squints over at me, and I play dead, pretending to sleep. There’s no more heat, no more seething blood. The slow, monotonous flowing of thin blood through blue veins, for three hundred years. I hear him rustling shopping bags in the kitchenette, turning...

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 portrait of Ellis Island through primary source documents from immigrants, interpreters, and medical staff. In the excerpt below, Szejnert details how the island's medical inspectors determined which immigrants were healthy enough to be let into the United States. An Immigrant Like an...

Marcos Tejo, the protagonist of Agustina Bazterrica’s taut and thought-provoking second novel, is tormented by horrifying dreams. In one, he watches helplessly as a wolf consumes his son. In another, he stands amid tree limbs strewn with “eyes, hands, human ears, and babies.” Daybreak, alas, brings him no relief. For Marcos, reality is every bit as disturbing as his nightmares. Tender Is the Flesh was first published in Spanish in 2017, earning its Argentinian author the...

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 Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels by Subimal Misra, translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy | Fiction | 296 pages | ISBN 9781948830157 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us...

In this ironic poem by Arlinda Guma, statues of great writers and thinkers find themselves subjected to unpleasant COVID-19 prevention measures. In Athens the statue of Pericles is being disinfected; and for good reason, all those ideas of freedom and democracy clash with an era where humanity communicates in GIFs. Nor is the statue of Dante across the sea doing so well; for a good two hours it lay in a coma, slapped by a former professor of comparative literature laid off by cutbacks,...

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 Catapult, traces the lives of people struggling to get by on the margins of Mumbai. In the story below, "A Truck Full of Chrysanthemums," a middle-class family grapples with their responsibility to their ailing servant. A window in the last kholi of the municipal chawl is always open. Seen from the...

This feature of Guaraní poetry is the first installment in the Words Without Borders Indigenous Writing Project. The selection criterion for the feature was simple: I sought lyric texts that made me uncertain. Discomfort and incoherence are signs of different ways of poeticizing or narrativizing the world. Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar said of Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s work, characterized by deviations in spelling, that it is “bad...

A traveler takes to the road in this dreamlike poem by Miguelángel Meza.   Listen to Miguelángel Meza read "Dawn" in the original Mbyá Guaraní. By the streaming of the road I go I enter lift and pass. Black. I pause, see nothing. Wetness.  Black and streaming the road fragments before me. Wet I plunge on, all before me flowing.  The road stowing memories huddles dark under a seed-field of stars. Heavy my forehead. I part thickets of prone...

In this poem, Alba Eiragi Duarte contemplates the ways in which fire both encompasses and transcends the elemental, providing sustenance and companionship. Listen to Alba Eiragi Duarte read "My Fire" in the original Avá Guaraní. At light of dawn I rise and make fire, and dry in nascent fire-gleam the space where dew once pearled.  Joyful, joyful my fire, burning hot for máte to be made, I stoke the embers, prod-stick crackling in the coals.  The yams I...

In this poem by Susy Delgado, an exhausted god lets earth descend into darkness and death. Our First, Original Father is suddenly old tired   worn out he sits   he crouches down he dozes off eyes closed to the soul of the earth and his home It’s getting late they’re blowing already those winds of orphanhood Our First, Original Father has already lowered his arms and he no longer scatters across the rough weather his wisdom his aged breath he no...

In this poem, Alberto Luna seeks answers beyond traditional conceptions of good and evil and the images that give them their power, staking out a spiritual path all his own.   Listen to Alberto Luna read "Serpent" in the original Jopará Guaraní. There is no serpent. I alone plunge my roots and outstretch my branches. I alone am for myself fruit of intense sweetness, I alone, facing myself, make my mouth water and lick my lips. I alone, before myself, beg...

Xirú by Damián Cabrera is a multilingual lyric novel set in Ciudad del Este—a Paraguayan city in the Triple Frontier shared with Argentina and Brazil. The title refers to the Portuguese word of Guaraní origin used by Brazilians to refer to Paraguayans at the border, which shifts from meaning “friend” to “invader” or “fool.” The novel is written predominantly in Spanish but is interlaced with Portuguese and Guaraní,...

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 Jewish refugees—and its own Jewish citizens—before and during the Holocaust. Among recent works of literature by and about Turkish Jewry, there is one classic that, like a recurring dream, consistently appears in the novels and essays of intellectuals and writers who either venture...

In this essay, Poupeh Missaghi details her experience of isolation on a solitary Persian New Year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City. A few days after the new Persian year began on March 20, Dad called from Tehran. He was sobbing. “Your grandfather passed away,” he said. The first thing that struck me was his choice of “your grandfather” over “my father.” He spoke very shortly, unlike most times, when he wants to stay online even when...

Nilbar Güreş's "Rose of Sapatão" is the cover art for the June 2020 issue: The Queer Issue XI. During the last months, I’ve been painting at my home studio, which I normally don't do because I never have this much time or this emancipated state of mind. Working only for myself, without Skype appointments, flights to catch, or schedules to follow, has been a relief. To work freely feels like a blessing—because I...

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 New York as you feel/see it? New York is kinetic, frictive, and relentless. The unceasing pace of its streets, with endless throngs of people and cars, feels inescapable. People from all over the world live and move together, charged with a...

In humorous and reflective brief notes, Laia Jufresa records daily life in quarantine in Edinburgh. My daughter is a doctor. A dragon doctor. I know this because she tells me every day, all day long, and has been doing so for a month, ever since the nurseries closed. Her conviction wavers only occasionally, when she asks: Mamá, where can I find a real dragon? She says this in Spanish, but puts the words “real dragon” in the English order: adjective, noun. When she...

It is not every season that two new translations of a major work of Western literature appear simultaneously, yet that is precisely what has occurred with the 2020 summer catalog and the publication of fresh English-language versions of the Portuguese-language original of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908). Machado was the founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and, more importantly, is widely...

In Víctor del Árbol's novel Breathing Through the Wound, translated by Lisa Dillman and out this week with Other Press, an artist accepts an unusual commission that pulls him into Madrid's criminal underworld. In the excerpt below, another character narrowly escapes a murder attempt. His last few nights in jail, Arthur could hardly sleep. Every minute of every hour was like a re­enactment of those other nights—the terrible...

A gender transition unites a mother and daughter in this poem by Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto. When I was born my mother gave me an ancient gift, the gift of the mystic Tiresias: to change sex once in my life. Even from my first wails she understood that my growth would be a rebellion to come unstuck from my flesh a fratricidal fight between spirit and skin. An annihilation. So she gave me her clothes, her shoes, her lipstick; she said: “Take these, my son, become what you are if...

In echoes of the Kafka text from which this poem takes its name, a queer man longs to confront his homophobic father for a lifetime of injury in this poem by Berlin-based writer and artist Ricardo Domeneck. Now that my lord more closely resembles a hunk of meat with two eyes turned toward the dark ceiling from the gurney where likely you will not die alone only because not even able to swallow your saliva yourself in the company of this tube alone that feeds you I ask myself if...

Mutsuo Takahashi admires the ancient Greeks’ innocence and lack of shame about their bodies in this short poem. In Olympia, young men do not wear a single thread In Pythia, in Isthmia, and in Nemea too In every gymnasium in every small town They’re as naked as the day they were born It’s because they were born this way They’re honest and upright, not the least bit lewd Like the Greek summer sky, Pure and fresh, a model of health itself What made them so obscene...