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As the days grow hotter and the school year draws to a close, you—and the kids in your life—might have some extra time on your hands. To help you plan your summer reading list, we’ve picked out ten of the most exciting translated children’s titles coming out in the next few months, ranging from picture books for very young readers to middle-grade and YA novels. From Ukraine, Venezuela, Finland, Taiwan, and more, these imaginative and beautifully illustrated...

In 2019, translator Hannah Kauders stumbled on a copy of Las Biuty Queens, the second book of short stories by Chilean writer Iván Monalisa Ojeda, and fell in love. Kauders immediately set out to translate this unique short story collection, in which Ojeda draws from his/her own experience as a trans performer, sex worker, and undocumented immigrant to chronicle the lives of Latinx queer and trans immigrants in New York City. I spoke to Kauders (whom I first met when we were...

For Pride Month 2021, we asked eight writers and translators to recommend their favorite queer titles in translation. The books they shared with us—from Chile, China, Equatorial Guinea, France, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—explore a broad range of genres and themes, reflecting the richness and variety of contemporary international queer literature. Read on for speculative fiction, manga, a short story anthology, and more!    In the Face of...

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Welcome to our twelfth annual Queer issue. This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments. Some find themselves at turning points, while others reckon with past choices or cope with the fallout of decisions made by those around them. In their divergent settings and circumstances, these characters confront their individual crises with ingenuity and alacrity, pivoting within their shifting contexts. In South African writer Olivia...

Grandma’s Girlfriends is a response to The Rainbow Bus: Youthful Reminiscences of Twelve Older Gay Men/彩虹熟年巴士: 12位老年同志的青春記憶 (GBooks, 2010). Tong, the cameraperson at the launch of The Rainbow Bus, remembers feeling indignant that only queer men were included in this book, and set in motion a plan to record the lives of older queer women too. Over the next few years, a...

A woman leaves her husband and two daughters and ventures into a resort in the Algerian desert in search of refuge in this short story by Nina Bouraoui. I’d like to talk to you and tell you how I arrived here, around eleven in the morning, I’d like to describe the feeling of freedom to you, tell you how strange I felt as the plane flew over the sea of sand on its way to In Salah, how far removed from everything, how close to myself, for the first time in my life­, it...

A trans woman’s view from her window resurfaces pleasant and painful memories in this excerpt from Olivia M. Coetzee’s novel Innie Shadows. Where is Carl? It’s a dark and cloudy Tuesday morning. Veronique Plaatjies, or Nique, as she’s known to her family and friends, is sitting at her makeshift desk. She starts every morning the same way. A steaming cup of black coffee, curtains pulled back and windows slightly pushed open, a perfect frame to watch the world go...

An unexpected letter brings a revelation about family trauma in this excerpt from Javier Stanziola’s novel Hombres enlodados. The envelope and paper smell of empire.   The dirt-colored envelope is longer and wider than the ones sold in the little Chinese stores. Its corners and folds house a blinding white page, not like the thin, bone-colored kind they sell in the Arrocha Pharmacy on...

Memories of family, childhood, and love, and his Colombian hometown haunt the exiled speaker of this poem by Raúl Gómez Jattin. For Zuni Roca Maze of farewell witnesses to tears   Sun So much sun sometimes I’ve forgotten its nights Sun on rooftops and pedestrians rushed But also shade below the sky sombrero Shade in the park’s fig trees   And sometimes sweet shade in what a friend says Maze chased by my same old childhood With purple doves...

A schoolgirl's crush is interrupted by an unexpected tragedy in this excerpt from Li Kotomi’s novel Solo Dance. Note: Li is bilingual and has written versions of Solo Dance in both Chinese and Japanese. This excerpt is translated from the Chinese; Solo Dance is forthcoming in English from World Editions, translated from the Japanese by Arthur Reiji Morris. When had she first become aware of the enormous dark shadow hovering around her? And where had that dark...

A conversation between two Malaysian expats from different generations takes a surprising turn in this excerpt from Fahmi Mustaffa’s novel Amsterdam.     Ah, Theo! Come in, son. Here, let me get your coat. Thank you, uncle. You can just call me Pak, it’s more friendly, right? Ha, come in, come in. Theo was led to the living room. Every inch of the space was neat and well organized. Strangely, Pak Latif’s house had no television. Theo, where are you from,...

Among the many online literary and arts journals published in India, हाकारा । hākārā occupies a rather unique position, embedded in a strong linguistic regionality while also expressing an internationalist outlook. The bilingual journal, organized around a single theme for each of its three yearly issues, publishes fiction, poetry, and criticism in both Marathi and English, along with visual art and video pieces. Situated in between...

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary publishers who make these books possible about their experience working in this vital field. For the eleventh installment in the series, we spoke with Edmund Wee, publisher of Singapore-based Epigram Books.   WWB: Could you tell us about the history of...

Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation of Chi Ta-wei's The Membranes, a classic of queer speculative fiction originally published in Taiwan in 1995, is out this week from Columbia University Press. In the excerpt below, the protagonist, Momo, reflects on her unusual origin story. Momo brushed her yellow bedroom wallpaper with her fingers. Then she bit gently into a hothouse peach, sweet juice oozing from pink skin so delicate it would bruise if you blew on it. Had she...

Jorgenrique Adoum turned his own name into “postspanish.” Melding the “e” of Jorge to the “e” of Enrique and vice versa, he transformed his own signature into a banner of sorts, an embodiment of his politically charged rebellion against linguistic conventions. The Ecuadorian poet, who has been hailed by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda as “the best Latin American poet of his generation,” has finally made his book-length debut in...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes books translated from Bengali, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, French, and Chinese.    From New Vessel Press | Roundabout of Death by Faysal Khartash, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss | Fiction | 176 pages | ISBN 9781939931924 | US$16.95 What the publisher says: “Set in Aleppo in 2012, when...

Last month, literary translator Nicholas Glastonbury, who translates from Turkish and Kurdish, posted a Twitter thread about the failings of the publishing industry when it comes to translated literature. I recently interviewed Nicholas to discuss these failings, especially when it comes to non-Western languages, and how we can better navigate this flawed system. Anton Hur (AH): Your recent thread on the frustrations of the submission process for literature in translation obviously...

Published by Carcanet Press in the UK last year, Songs We Learn from Trees is the first book of Amharic poetry in English translation. Editors Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje, themselves poets and translators, present over 250 pages of poetry ranging from folk and religious verse to work by contemporary and diaspora poets. While the anthology provides a representative survey of poems in Amharic, it is still only the tip of the iceberg, opening the door for readers to imagine how much more...

In this interview, translators Jenna Tang and May Huang discuss their experiences translating contemporary literature in Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Their conversation touches on the diversity within the Chinese language, translating work that resists compartmentalization, publishing houses in the US and in East Asia, and breaking into the translation world as BIPOC women. Below the interview is a list of resources they’ve compiled for emerging translators working with Taiwan...

Russian feminist poetry arrived in English with three seminal publications in 2020/21: the much-debated bilingual anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (Isolarii, ed. Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse), featuring twelve poets, including Lida Yusupova; Rymbu’s Life in Space (Ugly Duckling Presse); and now Yusupova’s The Scar we Know, which includes sizable excerpts from three of her Russian collections. And it is Yusupova—hailing from Leningrad...

For many English-speaking readers of Haitian literature, one author usually comes to mind: Edwidge Danticat. Though there are many more Haitian and Haitian diasporic writers working in English—including Roxane Gay, Dimitry Elias Léger, Francesca Momplaisir, Ibi Zoboi, and sister coauthors Maika and Maritza Moulite—Danticat's gorgeous, evocative prose is ubiquitous. There is little doubt that her writing has shaped and expanded the scope of what Haitian stories and...

This week, Seagull Books publishes Wolves, a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar (1910–57), who is often described as the father of the modern Hindi short story. Translated and introduced by Saudamini Deo, the collection offers English-language readers access to one of the key figures of twentieth-century Hindi literature. The title story, reproduced below, follows a caravan that attempts to escape a ravenous pack of wolves. "What’s a wolf?" Kharu...

Kjell Askildsen, winner of the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize in 2009, is a consummate chronicler of contradictory, quicksilver emotions and impulses. There is in his work a careful calibration of his characters' inner lives, of small dramas in no way empty of incident, whose ultimate crux is the desultory, dangerous weight of time: time is too slow, nothing ever changes, time doesn’t matter, then it is too abrupt, it’s unbearably long—all in prose that is as...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For May's installment, Julia Powers passed the baton to Adam Morris, who translates from Spanish and Portuguese into English.   What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books...