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In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

Marcin Wicha discovers that choosing the right urn for his father's ashes is a process fraught with nightmarish options that could wake even the dead. “Please choose an extension number or wait to be transferred to the front office,” and the voice of Louis Armstrong on the phone:                             And I think to myself,                    ...

The author remembers how his father asked for American cookies from the hospital bed, and how, after a tumor claimed his life, no one ate the oranges in the garden.     In memory of José João Serrano Peixoto   The day begins to stir and things around me begin to stir a little also. I open the shutters. The flowers in the vases lift themselves toward the slender light that bathes them. The light skims low over the earth, like a plague stretching...

In Mishka Lavigne’s play Haven, the famous writer Gabrielle Sauriol has died in a car accident on the Pacific coast. Her only survivor is her adult daughter, Elsie. In this scene, Elsie attends her mother's funeral.   ELSIE Funeral home. I’m in mourning. That’s what one says, right? That’s what one says. My sincere condolences. Thank you. My most sincere condolences. Thank you. All my sympathy. Thank you. Condooooolences. Thank youuuuu. Sincere . ....

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

In the US, Thanksgiving is this month’s major holiday, but for others November opens with the second and third days of the celebration known collectively as the Day of the Dead. Those days—Halloween, All Saints’ Day (that much-missed, exquisitely timed holiday for Catholic trick-or-treaters), and All Souls’ Day—prompt our consideration of the departed, as well as contemplation of our own mortality. We’re marking the holiday with writing that explores...

A Different Context I first came to know another side of Vietnamese poetry, outside of the formal education system, through “virtual encounters” and friends in distant places, writers and works on internet forums like Talawas, Tiền Vệ, Evan, Gió-O, Hợp Lưu, Tạp Chí Thơ, and overseas Vietnamese publications passed from hand to hand between friends inside the country. The circulation of these publications over many years even now...

A piece of furniture in an unusual location sparks a series of interrogations.      a velvet chair             standing by itself                         on a highway a chair standing by itself on a highway             means its life is over a life of ups and downs             before it was...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in the Netherlands remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục...

What begins as a meditation on love soon meanders past a lighthouse, past an ox with broken horns, until it reaches consciousness.    1 Love I liberate the captive herd within me I summon back the fossilized kisses 2 If things have souls then things bear static souls 3 Hungry birds are building nests in space Affliction gathers in the handkerchief of a bride on her wedding day 4 We kidnap fear by the sharp-edged tongue of a knife 5 The sound of your crying purifies the...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

These translated, cut-up and reassembled Vietnamese texts are by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, originals by Nguyễn Quốc Chánh (“Syndrome,” “Fucking Skulls Open”), Bùi Giáng (“Sương Tỳ Hải”), and Nhã Thuyên (“taste of waters”).   birds one by one penetrates a gap, disappearing wings disappearing songs, beaks remain, cut open one another’s eyes, napes, death...

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

When Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, invited Dubravka Ugresic to serve as a guest lecturer in the fall of 1991, the timing was fortuitous, to say the least. Ugresic’s homeland, Croatia, was caught up at that time in a virulent nationalist movement that demanded independence from the crumbling Yugoslav Socialist Republic and was part of a surge of separatist insurgencies which would soon lead the whole region into open conflict. In the following years, the Yugoslav wars...

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 Melbourne as you feel/see it? When you wake up early in this big city, the first thing you often see in the vast sky is masses of hot air balloons: it makes me feel faithful to the day, and I imagine myself surrounded by citizen...

In this 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.   Certain secrets weigh heavy on those who carry them. Many times these dark secrets metastasize—their consequences reverberate beyond the secret’s participants and are passed down to subsequent generations. Each of the novels recommended in...

Our cover art this month, “Women and Bicycles,” comes from Tejubehan’s Drawing from the City (Tara Books PVT LTD). Born in Rajasthan, Teju and her husband Ganesh belonged to a community that wandered the streets, singing devotional songs in exchange for grain, clothes, and money, a dying occupation that forced Ganesh to look for other work. After encountering the artist Haku Shah, Ganesh began to draw, and he encouraged Teju to pursue art as well, in spite of the fact...

breakfast in house at the top of a hill. on the island of hydra. i spotted her. she was sitting down. her legs crossed. i saw the blonde hairs. she wasn’t wearing underwear. she must have been 50. i was 25. i’d met her daughter in paris. we’d shared dreams. revolutionary ideas with our bodies. moving the earth’s axis. i was her daughter’s friend. *** i stayed with the two of them in that white house for three days. with the breakfasts where i could glimpse...

Organized by English PEN, the International Translation Day celebration at the Free Word Centre occurred on September 28, 2018.   International Translation Day was celebrated this year at the Free Word Centre in London with an evening event on September 28. While this format was much reduced from the full day of parallel sessions conducted in previous years at the British Library, the event sold out quickly and the atmosphere was fabulously buzzy as literary translators came...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Dorothy, a publishing project | The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana | Fiction |128 pages | ISBN 9780997366679 | US$16.00 What the publisher says: “A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed ex-detective as she searches...

The literary world has a growing tradition of books about failing to write. This has a lot to do with the rise of auto-fiction: how long can an author write about herself, really, without bringing up writer’s block or how much she hates her work? Mostly, the only person getting disappointed in these novel-failure novels is the writer. Maybe there’s a contract about to be broken, or an opportunity getting squandered, like the Fulbright in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the...

We spoke with Janet DeNeefe, founder and director of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. Now in its fifteenth year, the festival will occur October 24–28 in Ubud, Bali. Check back on WWB Daily for festival coverage.   Words Without Borders (WWB): You created the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival fifteen years ago. Can you speak a bit about the inspiration for the festival? Janet DeNeefe (JD): We created the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival as a healing project...

The following is excerpted from Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, translated from the German by Damion Searls and forthcoming with New York Review Books. Set between August 1967 and August 1968, each chapter represents a day in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In addition to recounting her daily life in New York, Gesine shares stories with her...

At PEN America’s Lit Crawl Brooklyn 2018, Words Without Borders and SLICE Literary partnered to present a multilingual exquisite corpse, a story authored by four international writers—Glaydah Namukasa, Ibtisam Azem, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Silvana Paternostro—and translated by Dr. Merit Kabugo, Sinan Antoon, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Mary Ann Newman.  In the exquisite corpse tradition, one writer penned the first segment of the story (in this...

JLF at New York occured on September 20, 2018. The festival brought together acclaimed authors and thinkers at the Asia Society in New York City.   On September 20, the 2018 JLF at New York began, as all good festivals should, with percussion and strings, with arm-flapping, hand-clapping, and the stirring vocals of Zila Khan. The legendary Indian Sufi singer sat cross-legged on a carpet at center stage with a shawl to cover her bare feet from sight, and as her voice...