February, 2020 The City and the Writer: In Rome with Peter Covino (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | February 10, 2020 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 Rome as you feel/see it? This past July was scorching hot... For Oscars Season, 5 Stories of Cinema from around the World (WWB Daily) By Alexandra Vail | February 7, 2020 Counting down the minutes to Oscars night? No doubt you've watched all nine Best Picture nominees. If it's the Academy Awards you've got on your mind and yet you just know the movie is never as good as the book, you've come to the right place: we've taken a spin through our archives and are proud to present five stories of cinema from around the globe. From a movie-theater quarrel in Catalonia to a meditation on Iranian film, these stories will keep... Framing the Story: Six Graphic Narratives (Magazine) By Susan Harris | February 4, 2020 In “Contacts,” Melanie Leclerc’s graphic memoir of her childhood, her famous cinematographer father gives her his Leica and teaches her how to use it. As he takes her through the steps of creating photos, he tells her, “Framing’s the most fun. Because framing means choosing, out of everything it’s possible to see, what’s going to stay. What’s going to tell the story.” In this, our fourteenth annual graphic novel issue, Leclerc and five... A Seam of Light and Black (Graphic Lit) By Moussa Kone and Walter Pamminger and Bastian Schneider | February 4, 2020 The outlooks and the insights need to be revised. Contacts (Graphic Lit) By Mélanie Leclerc | February 4, 2020 It's as if my childhood was preparing me for the camera, the photo, the image, and the documentary. South of Alameda (Graphic Lit) By Lola Larra and Vicente Reinamontes | February 4, 2020 But three days ago, everything changed. The View (Graphic Lit) By Marlon Hacla and Apol Sta. Maria | February 4, 2020 An escalating inquiry into the passage of time. Crocodiles Are Everywhere (Graphic Lit) By Juliette Boutant and Thomas Mathieu | February 4, 2020 He's touching me. Beirut Trilogy (Graphic Lit) By Barrack Rima | February 4, 2020 Protests against the government's incompetence multiply. From Five Continents to Five Boroughs: A Language Map for New York City (WWB Daily) By Ross Perlin | February 3, 2020 Ross Perlin, codirector of the Endangered Language Alliance, explores five languages—Lenape, Nahuatl, Seke, Irish, and Mandinka—that are featured alongside scores of others on the organization’s language map of New York City. In December, the Endangered Language Alliance—a nonprofit whose mission is to document and support endangered languages—released the first-ever linguist-designed language map of New York, one of the most linguistically diverse cities... January, 2020 The Watchlist: January 2020 (WWB Daily) By Tobias Carroll | January 29, 2020 Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Europa Editions | The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated from the Persian by Anonymous | Fiction | 256 pages | ISBN 9781609455651 | US$18.00 What the publisher says: “The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to... The City and the Writer: In Auckland, New Zealand with Chloe Honum (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | January 27, 2020 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 Auckland as you feel/see it? Watery, green, international, glistening, focused, striving, self-conscious, thoughtful. What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city? Saying goodbye to my mother at Auckland Airport. I was... Sexto Piso’s Diego Rabasa on Existential Selfies and Publishing the Books He Loves to Read (WWB Daily) By Victor Meadowcroft | January 24, 2020 Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). Read more about his experience at the book fair. Diego Rabasa is an editor and founding member (alongside his brother, the author Eduardo Rabasa) of the award-winning Mexican independent publisher Editorial Sexto Piso. Having started out publishing... María Fernanda Ampuero on “Cockfight,” Visceral Writing, and the Cruelty of Family Life (WWB Daily) By Victor Meadowcroft | January 24, 2020 Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). Read more about his experience at the book fair. María Fernanda Ampuero is an Ecuadorean author and journalist whose debut collection of short stories, Cockfight (tr. Frances Riddle), will be published by the Feminist Press in 2020. She is the... A Balkan Road Trip Leads to a Reckoning with the Past in Olja Savičević‘s “Singer in the Night” (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Hannah Weber | January 22, 2020 Singer in the Night, by Croatian novelist, poet, and playwright Olja Savičević, may look like a conventional road-trip novel, but it is far from it. To start with, our protagonist is no existential young man but a middle-aged woman, the soap-opera writer Clementine. After an accident leaves her struggling with memory loss, she jumps into her golden Mazda convertible to look for her vanished first husband—ostensibly not for sentimental reasons but to retrieve the keys to her... Dispatches from the 2019 FIL in Guadalajara, Mexico (WWB Daily) By Victor Meadowcroft | January 22, 2020 Victor Meadowcroft reports from the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he attended panel discussions and launches, browsed the booths of innumerable international publishers, and interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). On December 2–4, writers, publishers, booksellers, and translators from around the world converged on the Expo Guadalajara... Looking Outside the Mainstream: Charco Press’s Carolina Orloff on Publishing Fiction in Translation (WWB Daily) By Victor Meadowcroft | January 22, 2020 Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). Read more about his experience at the book fair. Carolina Orloff is an Argentine publisher and translator, and the founder, codirector, and editor of the Edinburgh-based Charco Press, an independent publishing house focusing on contemporary Latin... Language as a Virus: Ariana Harwicz on Writing Bilingually (WWB Daily) By Victor Meadowcroft | January 22, 2020 Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). Read more about his experience at the book fair. Ariana Harwicz is an Argentine author, screenwriter, and playwright whose novels have been translated into more than ten languages. Her first novel, Die, My Love (tr. Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff), published... On International Literature and Travel (Magazine) By The Editors of Words Without Borders | January 21, 2020 This month, we’re engaging one of the more pressing questions facing the literary sphere. Reading, it is commonly averred, can make us better versions of ourselves. Without ceding that notion, we ask a different version of it: can international literature make us better travelers? Our debate includes contributions from four writers who bring wildly different perspectives: M. Lynx Qualey writes about Arabic literature and translation issues; Tomaso Biancardi is an Italian editor and... We Usually Ask Literature to be Humanizing Only When It’s from “Over There” (Magazine) By M. Lynx Qualey | January 21, 2020 M. Lynx Qualey is the editor of ArabLit Quarterly. Should we, she asks, really place the onus for responsible travel on international literature—and can such literature even improve us as travelers? Mark Twain read Arabic literature. Not widely; there were no English translations of Twain’s Arab contemporaries circulating in the mid-1800s. He’d surely have loved the satiric, word-spinning work of Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq, had it been available. Some of the... The Reader’s Openness to the Unfamiliar (Magazine) By Emmanuel Iduma | January 21, 2020 In examining whether international literature can make us better travelers, Emmanuel Iduma, a writer who splits his time between Lagos and New York, takes a deep dive into the headwater of Igbo, his own estrangement from the language, and the intentions of writers and translators alike. The introductory paragraph of Omenuko, Pita Nwana’s 1933 novel, the first to be written in Igbo, reads as follows: N’akụkụ obodo anyị... On the “Good” in “Good Traveler” (Magazine) By Shahnaz Habib | January 21, 2020 Shahnaz Habib is the author of Airplane Mode, a forthcoming book of narrative nonfiction about the complexities of travel. Drawing on her own experiences abroad, she concludes that literature may, in fact, make us better travelers—but not necessarily in the way we think. Traveling someplace new is not easy. One thought that terrifies me when I find myself in a foreign place is that I might be spotted looking through a Lonely Planet. I stay safe by carrying only... The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature (Magazine) By Tomaso Biancardi | January 21, 2020 Tomaso Biancardi is coeditor of The Passenger, a new series of travel magazines in Italian and English that publish long-form essays, investigative journalism, literary reportage, and visual narratives in order to tell the story of a country or city and to portray its shifting culture and identity, its public debates, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, conflicts, and open wounds. Through the lens of his own move to Istanbul, Biancardi explores the... Words Without Borders Receives 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Grant (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | January 16, 2020 New York, New York, January 16, 2020—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday awards totaling more than $27 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2020, including an Art Works award to Words Without Borders to support its flagship online magazine of international literature, education programs, and events. The Art Works funding category supports projects that focus on public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across... First Read—From “The Sweet Indifference of the World” (WWB Daily) By Peter Stamm | January 15, 2020 In Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World, translated by Michael Hofmann and out next week with Other Press, a writer blurs the line between past and present, fiction and reality, in his attempt to outrun the unknown. In the excerpt below, the writer describes his first encounter with his double to a young woman, Lena, who herself seems to be the double of the writer’s former lover. I’m an actor too, said Lena. I know, I said. How do you know?... Page 3 of 218 pages < 1 2 3 4 5 > Last ›
