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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 translated books from Mexico, Japan, Haiti, Argentina, and Norway.   From Deep Vellum Publishing | The Love Parade by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson | Fiction | 280 pages | ISBN 9781646051137 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “At the same time a fast-paced...

Twelve years ago, at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010, the earth shook Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for less than a minute. The earthquake shattered households, crumbled buildings, and claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people. Ever since that day, Haitian author Kettly Mars has been sifting through the social, natural, and humanitarian effects of the quake in her novels, as well as in commentary and activism. When the earthquake took place, she was about to go on tour to promote her novel...

As the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its second anniversary here in the US, we're looking back at another phenomenon from the past two years: the wave of dystopian novels translated into English. Below, we highlight nine of these titles—from Argentina, Egypt, Iceland, Japan, and more—in the order in which they were published. Ranging from grim to magical to "cheerful," these dystopian novels will (we hope) offer some much-needed distraction as we...

A series of apocalyptic earthquakes and aftershocks rock Tehran. Some residents attempt to flee, yet traffic snarls the roadways. Fights erupt. Cell service blinks out. In the midst of the growing bedlam strides Shadi, twenty something, questioning life, low on opium and looking to score. So begins Mahsa Mohebali’s exhilarating In Case of Emergency, a novel originally published in Iran in 2008 (as  نگران...

Just six years after publishing her first translation, Aneesa Abbas Higgins won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho. In this conversation, Abbas Higgins talks with Samantha Schnee about coming to translation in middle age and offers tips for aspiring translators at any point in their careers. Samantha Schnee (SS): What was your first translation and how did you get it published? Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): My first...

New York, New York, January 12, 2022—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has just announced that it will distribute more than $28 million in support of 1,248 arts and cultural organizations nationwide, including Words Without Borders (WWB). WWB will receive an Art Works award to fund the publication of its monthly magazine, its education programs through WWB Campus, and its free virtual literary events.  The Art Works funding category supports projects that...

Animals appear throughout literature of all languages and reading levels. Often used allegorically or to represent human foibles, they star in fables and myths, drive origin stories, scamper through children’s literature, and play major roles in narratives of all genres. This month we’ve visited the archive to round up stories featuring animals both wild and tame, in tales that range from folklore to contemporary war stories and in settings from cozy domesticity to stark...

Last week, Astra House released Shen Fuyu's The Artisans, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang. Shen's fifteen vignettes bring to life the skilled workers of his rural Chinese hometown, offering a portrait of a rapidly disappearing way of life. In the excerpt below, he remembers his childhood encounters with the town's stern tofu-maker. The tofu-maker cared more than anyone in Shen Village about reputation and placed a lot of emphasis on ritual. He...

As we usher in the new year, our staff, contributors, and board members share the books in translation they're most looking forward to in 2022.   Eric M. B. Becker Editor In 2022, I'm particularly looking forward to Jokha Alharthi's Bitter Orange Tree, due out in May from Catapult in Marilyn Booth's translation. Words Without Borders was the first to publish Alharthi's work in the United States, in our May 2019 issue. It was particularly...

This week, And Other Stories publishes Paulo Scott's Phenotypes, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. The novel centers on Federico, a mixed-race Brazilian who is often perceived as white, and his brother, Lourenço, whose darker skin has made him a target of racism since childhood. In the excerpt below, Federico, who has been invited to join a government committee related to the country's controversial new affirmative action quotas, thinks back...

One gets the uneasy feeling that 59-year-old Shukri Mabkhout has been holding himself back. It might be an automatic reflex, after decades of living under tyranny in Tunisia. He is currently the director of Manouba University — where he teaches Arabic, literature, and discourse analysis — and has produced many fine works of literary criticism. Mabkhout comes off as restrained in interviews. This benign demeanor is at odds with the raging passion and rebelliousness that...

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 Maltese, Mè’phàà, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Greek.   From Praspar Press | What Will It Take For Me to Leave by Loranne Vella, translated from the Maltese by Kat Storace | Fiction | 112 pages | ISBN 9781739994815 | UK£12.00 What the...

In 2021, Mike Fu and Jenna Tang worked together through the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), with a focus on prose from Taiwan. Fu had published his English translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese writer Sanmao with Bloomsbury the previous year, while Tang, a translator of both Chinese and Spanish, had recently received her MFA in creative writing from The New School and helped found the ALTA BIPOC Caucus. In...

If Rima, the narrator of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, could have her way, she would not be writing her story—she would be drawing it. “Before,” she writes, referring to her life in Syria prior to its ongoing civil war, “I used to believe that drawing was more capable of expression than words.” But Rima has been relegated to an underground cellar that is her de facto trap and perhaps her salvation, a cellar that is by chance supplied with...

Words Without Borders is pleased to announce the election of acclaimed author Calvin Baker to its Board of Directors.  "I am a great admirer of Calvin’s writing. A brilliant writer and educator with a passion for international literature, he will bring valuable expertise and insight to WWB's leadership," said Samantha Schnee, Chair. "Words Without Borders’ trustees and I are all delighted to welcome him to the board." Calvin Baker is the author of...

As the year comes to an end, our staff, contributors, and board members look back on their favorite international reads from 2021.   Eric M. B. Becker Editor One of my most thought-provoking reads this year came rather late in the year: Natassja Martin's memoir of a harrowing encounter with a Siberian bear, translated by Sophie R. Lewis. NYRB so often surprises me (though, at this point, I've come to expect the unexpected from them) with work like this and Lyall...

Each year, WWB is proud to offer a platform to dozens of international writers whose work has never before appeared in English translation. As 2021 comes to an end, we’re looking back at some of the most exciting and innovative voices that WWB introduced to English-language readers this year.    1. Ahmed Isselmou Writer Ahmed Isselmou debuted in English in WWB’s May 2021 issue, our first ever to feature writing from Mauritania. In an excerpt from his...

Just shy of two years since the city of New York was laid low by the COVID-19 pandemic, the December issue of Words Without Borders brings together work from five writers—all of them working in Spanish—that explores this multifaceted city. That such writing exists should come as a surprise to no one. A long tradition exists of writers from Spain and Latin America who have come and stayed in this city, and documented their experience in the only language they...

In this story by Michel Nieva, pandemic-era Harlem brings our protagonist back to 2001 protests in Buenos Aires's Plaza de Mayo, a movement whose size has perhaps only ever been rivaled in recent US history by the Black Lives Matter movement. It was shortly after I’d moved to Harlem, during that first pandemic summer, that I first learned about the war of the species. I’d lost my job, and with all the borders closed I’d ended up stranded in New York. In...

In this work of microfiction, Álvaro Baquero-Pecino constructs a humorous portrait of New York in very real numbers: security cameras, steps to climb the Empire State Building, and so much more. Three hundred eighty-one meters, 102 floors, and 6,500 windows. We know that more than 2.5 million people visit the Empire State Building each year. An average of eighty-seven couples get engaged atop its observatory every month. It’s estimated that the dimensions of an...

Words Without Borders talks to translators and scholars Esther Allen and Ulises Gonzales about the December 2021 issue of the magazine, the state of Spanish-language writing in and about New York, and the challenges and opportunities New York offers writers working in Spanish.   WWB: This month's issue of Words Without Borders brings together writers working in Spanish but living in New York to give us a different perspective on the city, from the vantage point of those who speak,...

In a New York courtroom, a legal interpreter with a failed family life of his own struggles to maintain neutrality in his boorish new client's inheritance dispute.   Civil and criminal courts are all about brawls, beheadings, hatred, theft, and beatings. Family courts, too, but there you might bear witness, at least in theory, to a hearing with a happy outcome, like a marriage or an adoption. It happens once in a blue moon. People bring balloons, have their pictures taken with...

In this short story by Sara Cordón, a new graduate from an elite institution and a new migrant starting his first job in the United States have a lot more in common than they think.    Let’s keep three things in mind: First, The Warriors, a 1979 action film about New York street gangs that a young Mercedes used to check out from the video rental store every couple of weeks, minimum. Training her non-lazy eye on the screen as precisely as she could muster, she...

An enterprising cam girl calls a middle-aged Brooklyn man's bluff when he asks to meet in person in this short story by Naief Yehya. “I love you,” he told her. Mel smiled. “I love you,” he said again. She kept on smiling, but her look changed as she pretended to look offscreen. “I love you,” he typed again. She stared at the message, and got close to the camera as if she were to say something confidentially. “I love you too darling,...

Miguelángel Meza's poetry chapbook, Dream Pattering Soles, was published this month by Ugly Duckling Presse in Elisa Taber's translation. A leading Guaraní poet, Meza was featured last year in the first installment of WWB's Indigenous Writing Project, which was devoted to Guaraní writing from Paraguay. In the poem featured here, Meza considers humanity's relationship to the environment.   Void As day dims. To Carlos Villagra...