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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 Worcester as you feel/see it? From certain vantage points you can see the bones of the old city. Graying old buildings. Brickworks. Row houses stacked up on the hill. The narrow streets crisscrossing into a labyrinthine display of one-way...

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape . . . —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”   Calendars add a particular cruelty to grief. The annual recurrence of a month crossing paths with a number can make the wounds of loss feel present again. Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner Guest, translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by Transit Books, is full of such moments of remembrance. The past—personal and collective—haunts...

Personal pronouns are just that: personal. They are intimately tied to how we present ourselves, or assert ourselves, in a heteronormative binary world. Many of us don't question the identity assigned to us through the words of others, but to some, a misgendered pronoun is a grating reminder that their true self, their personhood, is being overlooked or ignored. There is a growing movement among both queer people and allies to introduce themselves by not only supplying a name, but a...

I am old enough to remember when creative writing was something you “couldn’t teach” and was considered by the academy to be a less than legitimate area of study. (Journalism didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow.) In my youth, there were only a handful of MFAs in creative writing on offer throughout the US. Now creative writing departments and graduate degrees in writing and journalism are like porcini in a forest after a rainy spell. Although translation is certainly...

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections in Arabic, a translator, and a literary scholar whose research is offering new critical perspectives on feminist novels in the Arab Gulf. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. In this interview with Salwa Benaissa, Kareem discusses her ongoing study, Good Mothers, Bad Sisters: Arab Women Writers in the Nation. “I’m trying to introduce intersectionality as a...

The purge has been systematic and unrelenting. In the past few years, as Turkey’s strongman Recep Erdogan has consolidated his power following a failed coup attempt in 2016, thousands of dissenting politicians, activists, intellectuals and university professors have either been imprisoned or forced into exile. Newspapers, literary magazines and other forums of expression and public debate have faced censorship and scrutiny, with many editors harassed for content that does not toe the...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Seagull Books | Ice by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated from the Arabic by Margaret Litvin | Fiction | 256 pages | ISBN 9780857426505 | US$21.50 What the publisher says: "Based on Ibrahim’s own experience studying at the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography in Moscow from 1971 to 1973, Ice offers a...

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 Bangalore as you feel/see it? Bangalore—it is now called Bengaluru, but I find the old name hard to give up—was a small, sleepy cantonment town that woke up one day to find it had become a booming metropolis. It has done...

To spend time with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Keeping/ the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions is to enter into a flux of time that is both the past and future of American letters. The 372-page, large format book, recently published by Wave Books, is a tribute, a compendium, and also a repository of illuminating insights for writers and translators concerned with the questions that Rosmarie and Keith have been struggling with since the beginning of...

As you may have noticed, we’re celebrating our tenth Queer issue. WWB has always published queer work, of course: there was the Spanish writer Andrés Barba’s sorrowful long story “Nocturne,” about a doomed May-December romance, as well as an excerpt from Polish writer Michal Witkowski’s campy Great Atlas of Polish Queens and Matteo Bianchi’s first bow in our pages, the frisky “Maternal Pride.” And we continue to include queer narratives...

So J. Lee’s translation of Lee Hyemi’s “The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” from Unexpected Vanilla appears in this month’s Queer issue. After a year of emailing back and forth, the two met in person for the first time in Mangwon-dong on May 11 and talked about Surrealism, stereotypes about Korea, making up words, speaking out against sexual violence, and becoming a “grandma author.” This interview was conducted in Korean and has been condensed and...

이혜미의 시 <딸기잼이 있던 찬장>의 영문 번역이 Words without Borders 이번 달 퀴어호에 실렸다. 1년 가까이 이메일을 주고받다가 5월 11일에 이혜미 작가와 이소영...

I slept poorly while translating Geovani Martins’s O sol na cabeça, waking up repeatedly in the wee hours of the night, a solution to a thorny problem on the tip of my tongue, alarm clock glowing beside me, leaves stirring somewhere outside. After mumbling something incoherent, I’d fall asleep again. Hours later, the first words that would come to me in the bright of the morning were “Acordei tava ligado o maçarico!” Or some version of what would...

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 Bombay as you feel/see it? The cliché about Bombay describes “resilience” in the face of tragedy. Whatever happens—religious riots, killer floods, an unimaginable terror attack, a building collapse, a stampede...

The following is excerpted from Emiliano Monge’s Among the Lost (translated by Frank Wynne), winner of the 2016 English PEN Award and out tomorrow from Scribe US. Set in an unnamed land that could be the Mexico-US border reimagined by Breughel and Dante, the story follows a group of immigrants and traffickers, themselves victims of a generations-old purgatory. Throughout, the narrative is interwoven with quotes from Dante’s Inferno and testimony from real migrants,...

Translator Anton Hur on the increased visibility of queer Korean writers​.   Am I proud of this mini-feature of Korean queer literature in translation courtesy of Words Without Borders?  Hell yeah!  We have Lee Jong San, the second out queer Korean writer to publish a book of fiction, and an excerpt from that very book in question: Customer!  We have Kim Bong-gon, the third out queer Korean writer to publish a book of fiction, and an excerpt...

In this short story from Kim Bong-gon, a Korean student in Kyoto saves his professor from scandal, then finds himself on the verge of creating a new one.   Professor Shibata’s publishing class, with all its good intent, was slightly unrealistic. “A good writer makes a good editor, and vice versa.”  Her very first statement sounded like a fine opening, but upon giving it more thought, one began by asking “Oh, yeah?” and ended with a “Like...

A student meets her first androgyne and makes a startling discovery in this chapter from a futuristic novel by Lee Jong San.   My feet were wet when I met Ahn. It was the day before the Entrance Ceremony. The snow, which started falling the night before, had lasted till morning, and everything outside had turned white. For me, the ankle-deep snow was so exciting and new that I walked around in it outside for quite some time before returning to the dormitory. I opened the door to...

Susan Harris introduces our tenth Queer issue. Nearly a decade ago, our former editor Rohan Kamicheril planned an issue of queer writing. The issue proved so popular, and so reflective of our editorial vision, that we decided to make it an annual event. You’ll find queer writing at WWB throughout the year, but our June issues have provided a space to bring this multiplicity of voices into conversation with each other and with readers. This month we bring you our tenth Queer issue....

A sensuous prose poem from South Korean poet Lee Hyemi​.   We stood on our tiptoes and fumbled around the top shelf for a taste of those red, red things. With mouths dyed red, we felt like a pair of nipples.   Sister, we must be a cleverly split person. The morning we wore the disheveled green crowns of strawberries and spoke of our first wet dreams under the covers. We laid a chewy seed in every pore, growing recklessly private and gradually tender. In the kingdom for two...

In this short story by Afro-Puerto Rican author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, a tough preteen girl fights for acceptance and finds unexpected kinship.   1 I've come to the conclusion that purple is the color of secrets. In art class, the teacher insists on teaching us that colors have meanings. Red means passion. White is purity. Green seems to be the color of hope. Nobody speaks of purple but I encounter it so often, accentuating the skin, cheeks, and knees of so many classmates...

An anxious college student falls for a blue-collar man in Matteo Bianchi’s short story.   La stagione dell’amore viene e va   all’improvviso, senza accorgerti  la vivrai, ti sorprenderà. Love’s season comes and goes until suddenly you realize to your surprise, it is your life. —Franco Battiato The absurd heat of a May afternoon insinuates itself through my bedroom window to the accompaniment of Electronic’s mongrel mix...

A village tailor, a lonely client, and the shy apprentice caught in the middle, from a novel by Lu Min​.   Listen to Lu Min read "Scissors, Shining" in the original Chinese.   I was extremely devoted to studying Master Song’s craft, surrounded by swaths of cloth and bits of thread, whiling away a boyhood like a plant dyed an unnatural hue, brightly colored, but sick inside, silently suffering. I would go home once a week, and my parents would poke fun at...

A famous French writer recalls the affair that led to the secret of her success, from a novel by Céline Minard.   I drew up my first will as I was getting deeper and deeper into my third decade and my sales were increasing like an upwelling in a sea of oil, in order to stave off any potential plundering—postmortem or otherwise—and all havoc that could result from implied rights, from all the legal consequences that might arise should I have left everything...

In the grip of obsession, a man turns an open relationship into a triangle in an excerpt from a novel by Kári Tulinius.  Listen to Kári Tulinius read "Abel's Autobiography" in the original Icelandic.   Life never chooses the right moment to unveil love to you for the first time, when you’ve not yet experienced it—not, for instance, at a moment when the days are lumbering by at a crawl, like station wagons in bumper-to-bumper traffic—but...