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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...

Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišić's Where You Come From will be out from Tin House next week. Translated by Damion Searls, this autofictional work explores identity, immigration, and what it means to live between languages. In the excerpt below, the narrator considers how the "exotic quality" of his name has affected how he is treated in his adopted country of Germany. We have little check marks on our names. Someone who liked me called...

Next week, Black Ocean will release Lee Young-ju's poetry collection Cold Candies, translated from Korean by Jae Kim. The collection includes "Roommate, Woman," one of the winners of WWB's 2019 Poems in Translation Contest, as well as the haunting prose poem presented below.    An Evening of Sugar-Eating We were not woman and man when we walked on the riverbank. Our pockets full of sugar by evening. We haven’t forgotten how the storms that surrounded...

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 Polish, French, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, and Galician.   From Spurl Editions | Arthur’s Whims by Hervé Guibert, translated from the French by Daniel Lupo | Fiction | 124 pages | ISBN 9781943679140 | US$17.50 What the publisher says: “Arthur and his...

In Helene Bukowski’s Milk Teeth, a debut novel of stark images, “scorched” birds plummet from the sky and plants are “bleached by the sun.” Forests are eerily still after “the great death of the animals,” when desperate quadrupeds sought safety in ocean waters, their carcasses washing ashore “among the pieces of driftwood and plastic.” Bukowski published Milk Teeth in her native Germany in 2019, the year she turned 26, and as we see in...

We're pleased to welcome Allison Tim as the first-ever WWB education fellow. Allison is a writer, photographer, and budding filmmaker. After graduating from Macalester College with a degree in International Studies, she worked in media, education, and documentary film. Prior to joining WWB, she taught English in France and South Korea, where she wrote about arts and culture for the Gwangju News. Allison spoke with us about how she came to literature in translation,...

Later this month, UEA Publishing Project will release Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic, an anthology of short fiction by Arabophone writers from the African diaspora, edited by Garen Torikian and translated by Sawad Hussain and Nariman Youssef. In the humorous story presented here, Libyan author Najwa Bin Shatwan follows the unlucky Ikhmayyis as he searches for a replacement for his lost glass eye. The sole lamppost in the village decided to keel over onto Ikhmayyis’s...

We're pleased to welcome Soleil Davíd as a WWB editorial fellow. Soleil is a poet, writer, and translator who moved from the Philippines to the United States at age 17. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Arkansas International, Cream City Review, and The Margins, among others. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor of Indiana Review. Soleil...

“Excess-birth” or “illegal” children (usually girls) were those born to a family who already had a child during the years when China’s one-child policy, in force from the 1980s to 2015, restricted a woman’s births to one. Traditional preferences for boys meant that many tried to circumvent the law to produce a son and heir; many of these excess births resulted in forced abortions, abandonment, and even foreign adoption. However, numerous second, third,...

In the late 1940s, with World War II over, tensions were mounting in the French colony of Algeria. It is during this period that Mokhtar Mokhtefi gains admission to a prestigious French boarding school, Duveyrier, in Blida, Algeria, not far from his home. From the classrooms of this school, he learns about the philosophical and political principles that underpin French governance: liberté, égalité, fraternité. During his weekends at home among his family and...

In this short essay, Korean novelist Sang Young Park defends the literary quality of K-pop lyrics. If you know me, you know I love K-pop. You’d think a man in his midthirties would learn to step back from the front lines of popular culture, but I still check the Billboard 100 and K-pop charts every week (and get the thrill of my life when these two charts have the same No. 1). I also listen to almost every new release and have the latest hot music video on repeat in the background...

Language is more than just a method of communication. It is about the ability to lay down roots, to settle into an identity, to have a place in history, in the present, and in the future. Language is personal, but it is also political. Language is about knowing who you are and where you fit into the social world. People classified as Coloured by the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and now also the Democratic regime of South Africa, have for a long time been without roots, identity, and a...

Watch Khadija Tracey Heeger read her poem "Children of the Xam" in the original Kaaps. Poet Khadija Tracey Heeger honors a rich and complex heritage. Between the vertebrae of the Langeberg and carved deep in the palm of the Keerom, on the tongue of Slanghoek comes the sigh of reconciliation, it is here you’ll find the name Xam, in the earth and sky, and in the womb of the Breede. Plaited through the psalms of the Xam, Khoi, and amaXhosa the name Cape Town a journey still to...

Watch the music video for "Affirm" performed by SIEP, in the original Kaaps.   This rap performance by SIEP uplifts and speaks truth. I affirm the soul in each person I affirm the soul in each person It’s clean as a bone with the vocal tone Who is still suffering? Hector Pieterson That was seventy-six Try it now We make cop thugs cop slugs That’s one for you and your peeps Another one for your stepfather peeping At your sister, trying to chise We put that red on his...

Watch Andre Trantraal read an excerpt from his fiction "The Wind Blows Where It Wishes and You Hear Its Sound," in the original Kaaps.   A young boy finds himself desperately making amends in this novel chapter by Andre Trantraal.   The deafening ascent of a passenger jet, like an argument heard in passing, fills the early evening air. Bishop Lavis Township is a stone’s throw from D. F. Malan airport. Seven-year-old James—a slender brown...

In Nashville Blauuw's poem, the speaker decries the everyday tragedies that befall residents of council flats.   I lift my eyes up to the council flats, where does my help come from? Where moving out is mostly in a coffin and youngsters are expert in theft and multiplying hurt knife against the throat and enough guns on the street but no food to eat But while I toss the coin and skip school I’m the boss because I was destined for greatness But Mum’s purse was unable to...

Poet Shirmoney Rhode uses lotto cards as a powerful metaphor for parenthood in this poem.   some children are like lotto scratch cards to their parents they buy tickets for next to nothing and they place all their hopes and dreams on that one ticket then they score its surface with a coin or a small stone or anything that will make the silver come off easily and if it doesn’t reveal the numbers or symbols that will translate into a posh house or car then that ticket is bad luck...

A young woman learns about a family secret in this short story written and translated by Olivia M. Coetzee.   Words Without Borders · Olivia Coetzee Reads an Excerpt from "Slang Hiewel" (Snake's Hill) Listen to Olivia Coetzee read from "Slang Hiewel" in the original Kaaps.   My name is Susan Ruiters. Everyone calls me Sanna after my mom’s mother, Susanna. I was born in the late 1970s to my mother, Gertruida Johanna Ruiters, and my dad . . . Well,...

Chennai-born Meena Kandasamy is an award-winning novelist and poet, best known for her book When I Hit You. She started translating at the age of eighteen and has worked on speeches and writings by activist and politician Thol. Thirumavalavan, writer Salma, Tamil Eelam poets, and many more. Her work is an active resistance against gender- and caste-based violence, and she describes her writing process as taking things that "rattle her" and "smuggling them into English." Much of her recent...

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 Irish, Korean, Galician, Arabic, Spanish, and Dutch.   From Drawn & Quarterly | The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong | Graphic novel | 248 pages | ISBN 9781770464575 | US$24.95 What the publisher says: “Keum Suk Gendry-Kim...

If you’re looking for a seasonal chill, we direct you to our archives for these seven narratives that nod to classic horror tropes. While the settings may be familiar, you’ll find no clichés here, as plots take unexpected turns into terror. Featuring uninhabited villas and rustic campgrounds, robotic coworkers and phantom hotel guests, these seven pieces from Mexico, India, Macau, and more are guaranteed to keep you up all night.   “Corporal Liberio...

Edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion is out today from Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. This unique transnational anthology includes plays by Herta Müller (adapted for the stage by Mihaela Panainte), György Dragomán, Matéi Visniec, András Visky, and the Giuvlipen Theatre Company. The excerpt below is taken from the second act of The Spectator Sentenced to Death, an...

We’re pleased to welcome Adam Dalva as the new books editor of Words Without Borders. Adam’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Paris Review. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. He is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop...

Manon Steffan Ros was nervous about presenting Llyfr Glas Nebo to the world. Before it won the 2018 National Eisteddfod Prose Medal and the 2019 Wales Book of the Year, before it became a best seller, she questioned whether anyone would make time for this postapocalyptic story of a mother and son adapting to life as survivors of nuclear disaster in rural northwest Wales. But the book has resonated across Wales and, increasingly, the world; its dark, moving account of the resourcefulness of...

The publication of Mario Levrero’s (1940-2004) The Luminous Novel in English, in Annie McDermott’s beautiful translation, is a true literary event. Although Levrero has enjoyed cult status for some time in Uruguay and Argentina, his work is just beginning to get the recognition it deserves elsewhere. Published posthumously in 2005, The Luminous Novel is his masterpiece: an almost unclassifiable work, halfway between fiction and autobiography, in which we follow the author...