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We’re pleased to welcome Mandana Naviafar, who will be working with Nadia Kalman on our education program, Words Without Borders Campus, this summer. Originally from Tehran, Iran, Mandana is currently studying English literature and phronesis in the Honors College at the University of Houston.     Words Without Borders (WWB): What drew you to Words Without Borders/literature in translation? What is your personal relationship to language and/or translation? Mandana...

Words Without Borders partnered with SLICE to produce an International Exquisite Corpse story, written by four writer/translator teams from around the world. Below is the resulting story (in both the English translation and the original languages), which was published in issue 21 of Slice Magazine.   Words Without Borders is thrilled to partner with SLICE for a second time to present an international Exquisite Corpse, this time on the theme of Panic. Here’s how it...

Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, is forthcoming from New Directions. Based on the author’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the novel depicts a mysterious, nightmarish hospital that transforms into an eerie, metaphorical space as the narrator has flashes of childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection.   Until now I haven’t had the chance to describe the hospital. I told myself I have plenty of time,...

Gaby is just a boy. He steals mangoes and disobeys his father. He patrols his block with friends. He imagines his first love, his school pen-pal, freckled and green-eyed in her Orleans garden. He likes the sugar in ice cream but not the cold, swimming but not the chlorine. Gaby is just a ten-year-old living in Burundi.   “The war between the Tutsis and Hutus,” Gaby asks his father, “is it because they don’t have the same land?” “No,” his...

Looking for appropriate international viewing fare for Pride Month? Veronica Scott Esposito offers a catalog of foreign films based on queer books. Kiss of the Spider Woman Brazilian director Héctor Babenco’s adaptation of Argentine Manuel Puig’s novel of the same name transfers the setting from Argentina’s military junta to Brazil’s. It stars William Hurt and Raúl Juliá as two perfect strangers trapped together in a prison cell—the...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Liveright | The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis by Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson | Fiction | 960 pages | ISBN 978-0871404961 | US$35.00 What the publisher says: “Drawn to the master’s psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siècle Rio de...

Development Assistant Part-time (two days/week) Brooklyn, NY Words Without Borders seeks a Development Assistant to support the Executive Director in the organization’s fundraising activities and administration. The ideal candidate will be a highly organized, detail-oriented self-starter who is able to manage a wide range of responsibilities while working collaboratively with a small team. This is a great opportunity to develop fundraising and administrative skills in support of a...

Việt Lê’s untitled self-portrait (time for tea) is the cover art for the June 2018 issue of Words without Borders: The Queer Issue IX. Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured, You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with...

In this new bimonthly series, “Best of the B-Sides,” critic and bookseller Lori Feathers recommends a new work in translation along with a number of backlist (“B-Side”) titles that you might have missed. The books selected might explore a similar theme, or include various titles from an author’s body of work. With this series we hope to draw readers to timeless works in translation.   I love a novel in which the author imagines a generational home...

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 City as you feel/see it? New York is a rubbish heap of a place, rude and loud, gray and anarchic, unforgiving and raw, greedy, mercenary, selfish and brutal and totally wonderful. It has little of the style of Paris. Not much...

On the occasion of Words Without Borders’s fifteenth anniversary, editorial fellow Núria Codina looks back at pieces in which writers explore the unique opportunities and challenges of living and writing in multiple languages.   Most of the world’s population is bilingual or multilingual, and multilingualism constitutes a source of inspiration for many writers, particularly those who write in a foreign language. But the aesthetic and creative influences of...

Part-time Words Without Borders seeks applicants for its fall editorial fellowship. The WWB Editorial Fellowship program is designed for individuals looking to build a career around the publication and promotion of international literature. Working closely with the editorial and communications teams, the editorial fellow will gain hands-on experience with all aspects of the publication of a digital literary magazine—from issue planning to online promotion. The fellow will become...

Welcome to our ninth annual Queer issue. As some readers have asked (and as we ask ourselves): Why publish a Queer issue? Queer writers and topics certainly appear in our pages throughout the year, and even the appearance of restriction to one issue suggests marginalization, isolation, or “other”-ing. Yet every issue we publish is predicated on “others”: writers in foreign countries, producing work in non-English languages, with themes and settings largely unfamiliar...

In the wake of loss, a woman fills her life with a mouthy and ever-growing new feline companion.  The cat had died at dusk. The breath of that life had slipped away along with the last streaks of sunlight. “As the body grew cold and stiff, it turned into a swamp you could easily sink into.” This was the explanation I’d always planned to give him for why the cat had left so many empty spaces in my rooms. I couldn’t wait to tell him; it was like being chased by...

Speech and writing aside, there must exist other routes to the heart of language. Perhaps the “chewing words” method buried along with City 1997 was merely one of those.     The International Fictional Cities website (www.internationalfictionalcities.com) makes it easy to find cities as tiny as those numbered 1982 to 1996, or 1998 to 2007. Users can locate them on interactive maps, view 3-D photos of any street they like, and learn about the latest...

In this bizarre tale by the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, a once banal, everyday fruit intoxicates the popular imagination of Fertile Soil Town.    1 “How come so many people are applying for travel documents?” an official from the Immigration Department asked. “Thousands and thousands of ’em are turning up out of the blue—it’s really strange.” The official who processed paperwork inked stamp after stamp.  “If this were a...

1997 or 9971 what’s it to me —Xi Xi, “Pebble”   Hong Kong’s unique geographical, cultural, and historical positions offer much to inspire the magic realist and surrealist literary imaginations. Since the 1840s, the territory has undergone British colonization, Japanese occupation, and, depending on one’s perspective, a return to the motherland, or, alternatively, a Chinese recolonization. It is part of China, yet the two are separated by...

In this story of sexual desire by Mortada Gzar, an Iraqi student at a gay bar hooks up with an American soldier who drives home the side effects of war.   It’s got to be the tenth time this has happened to me. I go out into the back alley of this bar to smoke and he approaches me with a greeting. “Cheers!” he says, clinking his glass against mine. Then he laughs, utters a few words in ammiya, says he was a soldier at Nasiriyah or Baqubah or Ramadi....

In this excerpt from his literary nonfiction debut, Remigiusz Ryziński looks back on the French philosopher-provocateur's 1950s stint in Poland, which drew the attention of the secret police.  Urban Legend Michel Foucault came to Warsaw in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded French Cultural Center at Warsaw University. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as A History of...

In this excerpt from Choi Jin-young's To the Warm Horizon, Dori, fleeing a pandemic that's wiped out the country, meets the nonchalant Jina and finds herself desiring more than mere survival.   Dori I opened my eyes. The bonfire had gone out. I could hear a babble of voices. Speaking Korean. It sounded like more than a couple of people. It was still dark outside. I woke Miso up and took a peek. There were two large box trucks parked in the vegetable garden. I did a head...

Uncurbed by either pretense or punctuation, Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên plays with nothingness as the tangibility of meaning.  ___________________________________________ In the ongoing fruitless search for a third-person-singular and gender-neutral term that remains both familiar and human in English, as "hắn" does in Vietnamese, the author and translator have settled on “that one.” I don’t want to construct an obvious...

In this excerpt from Sahar Mandour's novel Mina, a Lebanese actress is blindsided when she's outed by the press.    Mina comes out of the bathroom in her short white bathrobe, hurries toward her bedroom, darts in, shuts the door behind her. Her room brims with soft warmth from the electric heater, in stark contrast to the weather, to the rest of the house; her lips lift in a smile as she sits on the edge of the bed, getting ready, getting in, full of love. Her...

In this narrative by Norwegian author Tina Åmodt, two women travel to a remote house in the mountains where past and present create an air of desolation.  If you move to the wilderness, you need to be prepared for how memory can betray you. In the wilderness, you live in a simple house, you wake to your beloved’s face, you almost exclusively hear her voice. No racket disturbs the nights. No one rings the doorbell with a menacing desire. The recollection of clothes you...

Thailand’s Prabda Yoon, who made his WWB debut in our October 2017 issue, returns with the tale of a transgender woman at the end of her rope.    He picked up the nickname ’Mantique from his friends during his time at university. Because among the guys in his class—all rather busted-looking—he was hailed as the most romantic. Because he already had the nickname Man.   Because he didn’t like the nickname his father had given him and...

In this short story, Abilio Estévez's narrator wades into reminiscences of the murky, weed-choked waters of his adolescence in Cuba and an indelible experience with an older friend.   1 This is the story of a small happiness that, for some inexplicable reason, occurred the day I turned sixteen. Now, after such a long time, I can’t be sure if what took place had anything to do with my birthday. In any case it undoubtedly was a Sunday, gray and humid, because I...