Tuhin Das reflects on a writer’s struggle against censorship in Bangladesh and the power of words and empathy in difficult times.    Listen to Tuhin Das reading "The Assassin" in Bengali.   I give you these lines For you deserve them Many years later you will come to know Someone wrote these for you one day. I write when a dark night Has gathered over Bangladesh My writer friend is afraid A mournful clock by his bed Rings out suddenly He wakes up His eyes...

In this excerpt from A Crime in Ramallah, Abbad Yahya's narrator Noor remembers his adolescence in Palestine, marked by the second intifada.  At its peak, the intifada took over my parents’ lives. They weren’t explicitly affiliated with any one faction, but they tended to support anything Islamic, and the intifada fueled the continued rise of Hamas. My older brother's wife was an activist, a leader in fact, and our family was very proud of...

Never mind how it got here. If the previous tenant left it behind thoughtlessly or on purpose, if it sneaked in through a window while we weren’t looking, if, maybe, the neighbor who hates our vinyl collection put it here to fuck us over or was it maybe the man in the blue overalls who comes monthly to check the water, the gas, the electricity meters. I’ve consulted my favorite thinkers: Wittgenstein, Cioran, Steiner, but they have no answers. All I know is there is a tiger in...

They told us to be careful, that men would do nasty things to us at the smallest slip-up.  The saying carried the sound of sewer waters, of something dirty, and dark, like forest tracks. Despite this, we let it nestle in our mouths, to have a feel of its viscous, foreign nature. In hallways, sprawled under weak light bulbs, the hard coldness of the floor tiles traveled up our buttocks, and we pressed our legs tight to conjure up a spark from our rosy pearl. We checked the limpets on...

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are...

  I. Exile Let’s see. I grew up in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood where almost everyone was Ashkenazi. I remember a literature teacher at school who claimed that mothers in fiction control their children through food. And indeed, my childhood friend’s Polish-Jewish mother used to say: “If they want to eat—they’ll eat. If they don’t want to eat—they’ll also eat.” Another neighborhood mother would fling open the window and yell in a...

Translator's Note: Discovering Prasanta Mridha's essay series "Lost Livelihoods" was a delight. The first one I spotted was about black market Indian mill-woven cotton saris—a flourishing business during the early eighties. I was instantly transported to my childhood. There were many products being smuggled from India, but saris are the contraband I have a direct memory about. Bangladeshi mill cottons, according to my grandmother, had not achieved the softness of...

The postwar ruins (Roofs ripped off, The charred walls.) do not resemble Skeletons, stripped by the predators— The gnawed-upon scraps of ribs, Crushed to dust cranial bones. Only that the same birds Flock to the remains As to scorched ground. 2003   To be struck in the forest by a flash of light, where there’s crunch And crackling, rustle and creaking underfoot, and the hush That brings to mind wheezes and groans, whispering and sighs, Where every measly bush is...

On the Death of Jean Vigo  The day was silent to distraction,  only the dog’s growl traveled beyond the window  undulating slightly, barely eschewing  the bellows of the echo. A person—  that’s something interior (therefore, incapable of habituating itself to Being).  To rise, get out of bed, handle a book, open a responsive door—  no more than trifles,  but these ministrations are mystical rites when  they are inspired...

Businessman from Mongolia. Irkutsk Like a raven on a stripped branch, sitting alone on the roof of    a highrise. Having lost everything, from the height of the thirteenth floor,    dangles his feet. The angels of death—the photographers, TV journalists—    have already turned on their cameras, The embassy, the other side of the sacred shore, has already been    notified. Enkh Etrech, dear one, what have you...

In these two poems by Jovanka Uljarević, words conceal and convey, bind and liberate.      The Body of Your Unrest we spread out through cities avoiding the fields rarely dropping by museums are you counting the buried places how many are there yet to see even their names I no longer know screaming across the mountains we stop by library shelves to drink up a gallon of high quality mustiness in how many of them will we grow old is there anything that...

In this poem, Dragana Tripković careens through time and space, the lasting and the ephemeral.    It is not too late to write about time It is not too late to write right now about time. I must leave the signpost, because the South wind starts to blow in the middle of December. Moments like these can make a man love the wrong thing or the wrong person. The big station clock hasn’t worked for twenty-five years Its black, Roman lines menace with stiff...

Tanja Bakić seeks the textures of the intangible, the familiar, and the strange within the porous border between subject and object.    *** An open wound Under the hot earth Calls me out. I look at the sky With another’s eyes. A star like An eyeball Stares at me. I leave behind What I once used To be. And keep my pain. Velvet I am now. *** Your luminous body Casts up Mine as a shadow. A tear falls Onto a bone. In the water, Under the water, Naked I swim....

In the following excerpt from her novel Adriana, Theodora Dimova weaves a tale of another poète maudit.   Adriana was venomous, irritable, depraved, evil, decadently damned, I’m like a line of Baudelaire, she was thinking, and it was over for me long ago, the decision was made long ago, and I have no way backward or forward, and I have no way, her beauty was blossoming over the mire of vices, her skin was becoming more milky white, her bones growing...

In this short story, Zachary Karabashliev chronicles one widower’s struggle to begin anew in another country.   June 11, 2010 My name is Christo Christov Christov and I’m here visiting my daughter. My daughter and son-in-law, that is. Radoslava. That’s her name, not his. They live in America, in the state of California. They got me a visa this spring and brought me here. Anyway. I’ve started keeping a diary in this notebook—my daughter gave it...

In this poem, Boryana Neykova's traveler weighs what to take and what to leave behind.      Soon I will be leaving this town too the suitcase must not be too heavy things and people take up space but one wall from a dirty room...

  I remember the colors. I remember the textures, patterns and shapes—somewhere in between sight and touch. One fat stripe and two thin ones, stretching into infinity. A carpet? A sofa? All a bit rough, and possibly green. The baby bath was green, too. The bathroom floor was various colors, but mostly green. The dominant color. Was it really, or just in my memory? I’ve seen the baby bath in a dozen photographs, though only black and white ones. And yet I know it was...

  Petre Dimovski looks back at a turning point in a leader's youth The young man walked with his usual calm over the cobblestones of the Shirok Sokak promenade in Bitola, the city famous throughout the Ottoman Empire. He came from Salonika and felt he was ever closer to his goal of obtaining an education, now that he had been accepted as a cadet at the Military Academy here. At the same moment, the beautiful Bitola girl Eleni Karinte came out onto the balcony, aflutter and in...

A resourceful child learns the limited life of a good-luck charm in Natali Spasova's tale “When is Daddy coming?” The bare little feet came shuffling into the room, but the child’s sleepy voice received no answer. It was a small room, modestly furnished, with dark curtains on the windows that did not let in enough light. The frail body of a woman slumped in an armchair, her old throne. The little girl made her way through the bottles of alcohol and gently loosened...

Rumena Bužarovska observes a woman give her pretentious doctor husband a taste of his own medicine Although he’s a gynecologist, my husband likes to pretend he’s an artist, and that’s just one of the things about him that annoy me. Actually, I don’t remember exactly when most of the things he does and says started to bug me, but I can distinguish this one as one of my main peeves. For example, when we have people over he tells them that he...