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In this short story by Robert Marcuse, a man attempts to rid himself of his own shadow. When a man looks at his shadow, it’s because he’s thinking about something else: he looks at it without seeing it, lost in thought, and his gaze barely touches it. We’ve lived with our shadows so long that they no longer attract our attention. They’re withdrawn and rather mysterious beings often hiding just behind us, or they peek out from the soles of our shoes. They...

An unwelcome visitor becomes a coveted houseguest in this poem by Voltaire Oyzon.   Voltaire Oyzon reads "Water." Rain, this most ungracious guest, enters your house without bothering to knock very rude he’s all over the place messes up the house soaks the foot rags wets chairs winnowing basket grater firewood sleeping mat the covers even the pillows the wedding picture, my wife’s and mine . . . Three or four days he hangs out in our house. I tell myself, don’t...

Novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and anthologist Jessica Hagedorn burst onto the literary scene with her first novel, Dogeaters (1990), a kaleidoscopic portrait of postcolonial Manila in the late 1950s under the Marcos dictatorship. Hagedorn grew up in Manila and came to the US in her early teens, and her work across genres engages with and reflects Filipino culture through the lens of diaspora, interrogating racism, the immigrant experience, and social and cultural clashes both...

A homicide investigation takes an uncanny turn in this short story by Luiz Carlos Lisboa. Listen to Luiz Carlos Lisboa read "His Very Last Case" in the original Portuguese. "Walt! Walt! Walter!" Janice repeated in an increasingly strained voice, running her fingers through the white hair of the man lying on the bed. Standing behind him, the maid and a male nurse watched the scene unfold, not moving. Somewhere in the neighborhood a car horn had begun sounding and took several minutes...

Karaoke unites a group of Filipina expats in this short story by Genevieve Asenjo. She arrived as a guest and departed as an accomplice to a crime, after sitting down to a dinner of pinakbet and sinigang with the Kim family. At least, that’s what she tells me in between mouthfuls of peanuts and potato chips. We are at Janga Norebang in Koejong. Listen. One night in this Korean family’s typical apartment in Busan, tap water was gushing from the faucet onto the sink. There...

A juggler’s performance raises philosophical questions in this poem by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles. Swapping seven balls with his palm, and with air. Precision inhabits the gap between the ball’s trajectory and its anticipated pace at the brink of hesitation— the arc of descent. How does one grasp making sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch?    Is it when one rehearses alone or when one rehearses being alone? Which one holds when there...

In a group of tales by Tito Valiente drawing on a Filipino storytelling tradition, a supernatural beast seduces a young woman.   Editor’s Note: A Sugilanon is a form of story told orally. The power of the Sugilanon or tale depends on the skill and charisma of the narrator as he weaves the details of the story. Erlina's Sugilanon Begins Erlina was the all-around maid in my maternal grandmother's home. We did not have a wet nurse because by the time she arrived in...

In this poem by M. J. Cagumbay Tumamac, a free diver’s connection to the sea endures even as his tribal way of life disappears.   Listen to M. J. Cagumbay Tumamac read "A Planned Brief Documentary on a Teenage Boy in a Badjao Village." also after Jade Mark Capiñanes from his essay “Abal” We will start with the fact you are not impressed by the depth of the Celebes Sea. Since birth, you are tethered to the moon and sun exhorting you to surface and sink. We...

In this short story by Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano, a young girl longs to see the world beyond her rural village. Darkness falls in the afternoon. It’s going to rain again. The carabao and the goats have been herded off to shelter. The newly harvested corn has been covered. The house smells of fuel because our tiny lamp has been lit. Smoke rises from the hearth, a signal that Mama is cooking something. The five of us can’t go out. I want to go out so I can wait for...

In this poem by Enrique Villasis, faith and desire take the shape of a flock of birds. Here is how one is seared by unspoken desire: holy and yellow, Like this scene of a setting sun always ready to melt Over our eyes and chests, and the departing light bringing with it an ache Beneath our lashes. We are often taught to have our eyes closed, to ignore the weight Of our eyelids, to let loose in throbbing want: this is the beginning of every prayer. In the mind, a flock of birds, feathers...

Religious symbolism and threats of violence loom in this impressionistic poem by Marlon Hacla. This body, stuffed with nightmares a nesting ground for hawks, swollen with intractable blues, if only I could solicit a new shape for you, if only you would scintillate like a word. - Flanked in the middle of three sharp cops, a rose of the purest red, the gleaming points of sharp thorns. - Song that begets all songs, haunts the ensuing cult of the carillon. There’s the tolling for...

Once again the days shorten, the shadows lengthen, and the ghouls come out as Halloween rolls around. To help you celebrate this sinister time of year, we offer thirteen stories lurking in our crypt—er, archives—guaranteed to send a chill down your spine, from tales of the unearthly to depictions of evil that is purely manmade. We trust you’ll enjoy reading these (with every light on in the house).   “As he stared at the stake, stunned, Marcello was thinking...

  In the first entry of the long, episodic essay Summer 80, Marguerite Duras asks: “And what is this concept of summer anyway?” A timely question for the arrival of a new collection of her writing—fond memories of summer with its heat and slowness and inactivity. Duras, on the other hand, comes across as a hyperactive, if not always systematic, writer throughout Me & Other Writing, a volume of her selected nonfiction works just out with the publishing project...

In anticipation of City Lights’s publication of Silvina Ocampo’s Forgotten Journey (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan) and The Promise (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell), Argentine writer and critic María Agustina Pardini reflects on Ocampo’s writing and legacy and speaks with the translators of the forthcoming works.   Silvina Inocencia Ocampo was a short-story writer, novelist, poet, and one of the most influential writers of her...

Igor Štiks was born in Sarajevo, fled to Croatia with his family during the war, and now lives in Belgrade. He writes about citizenship in former and post-Yugoslavia and is the author of two novels, A Castle in Romagna and The Judgment of Richard Richter (originally published as Elijah’s Chair). His third novel, W, has just been published by Fraktura (Croatia) and is both a murder mystery and a reflection on a century of revolutionary struggle in Europe. Olivia...

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 Abidjan as you feel/see it? Abidjan is the pulse of Côte d’Ivoire, the barometer of all its energies, dreams, and disappointments. It is an attractive place for some, while others find it has an excessive nature. It is a...

A dream. It’s a foggy afternoon. I am in a forest, playing a ball game with my granddad. I am three or four years old. My mom has gone somewhere and I don’t know where she is. I feel abandoned and scared. I don’t want to play the game. I can barely see through the fog anyway, so I cannot catch the ball when my granddad passes it to me. Then everything disappears and I am all alone in the forest. I don’t remember much else, I have no idea how much time has passed;...

Il y a des natures purement contemplatives et tout à fait impropres à l’action, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mystérieuse et inconnue, agissent quelquefois avec une rapidité dont elles se seraient crues elles-mêmes incapables. There are purely contemplative natures quite unsuitable for action, which however, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, at times act with a swiftness of which they themselves would have felt incapable. —Charles...

Jokha Alharthi’s Man Booker International Prize–winning Celestial Bodies, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth and out this month with Catapult, follows the stories of three sisters—Mayya, Asma, and Khawla—and their families in a rapidly changing Oman. In the excerpt below, Mayya, who has just given birth, is cared for by her mother, Salima, as she receives her first visitors, including Zarifa, a former slave who is now in charge of Mayya and her husband’s...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Other Press | I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer by Ahmet Altan, translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar | Nonfiction | 224 pages | ISBN 9781635420005 | US$15.99 What the publisher says: “Confined in a cell four meters long, imprisoned on absurd, Kafkaesque charges, novelist Ahmet...

Ours is an age when criticism often celebrates fat-free sentences, restrained ironies, and hope that’s caged in self-awareness—novels that walk before us like sunken-cheeked, unsmiling catwalk models. Huzama Habayeb’s Velvet, by contrast, is unafraid of its fullness: its gold jewelry, its fleshy abundance, its black velvet, and most of all, its melancholic and romantic lyrics, as sung by legendary Lebanese diva Fairouz. Velvet is a novel crammed with love and loss as it...

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? This city/every mood/every tongue/every dark and light, every between. Gripping the wrist of the grisly wrenching past, abandonment, and also lights and noise, artifacts, the glitter and promise,...

In the winter of 2003, I was on a first-ever visit to Beirut. I’d come from Cairo, where I was living, and was a bit stunned by the cold. So it happened that I found myself in a shop, trying to buy a heavy sweater. I don’t remember what I said to the proprietor, although I’m sure I must’ve spoken in a heavy Egyptian Arabic. In my memory, he raised a finger and pointed at me, laughing: “Adel Emam!” Although I’m approximately the same height as the...

India’s vast and varied story traditions continue to exist orally across languages, cultures, and religions. Folktales featuring village deities and spirits, riddles that reference local flora and fauna, songs of specific marriage customs and rituals sit side by side with the grand narratives of pan-Indian epics and myths. But even the epics are brought down to earth, as it were, when we are told that the god-human heroes and heroines rested a while under the village tree during their...

Translated by Noor Zaheer, this folktale of treachery and thwarted romance—from the Kunju Pass Area in Lahoul, eastern Himachal Pradesh—explores the question of whether love can survive after death.   Outside a cave, three men crouched around a fire on that fateful night. Winter is severe in the upper Himalayas, but nowhere is it as harsh as when you have crossed the Great Himalayan ranges and reached Lahoul. Dotted with fields of potatoes and maize in the summer, when...