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...

Andrei Krasniashikh at the intersecton of soccer and drink Video: Andrei Krasniashikh reads “Haunted Swing.” Tonight, I’ll roast up some sunflower seeds, a whole bowlful, and plop myself in front of the television to watch the soccer game. Spartak will be playing Dynamo and I’ll be glued to the screen, tossing shells next to the plate, and following the game with bated breath. I’ll be desperately rooting for Spartak, but Dynamo will win, and I’ll so...

Alejandro Saravia charts the life and death of a rookie dealer on the mean streets of Montreal on a corner on avenue Decelles a Caribbean man finds an abandoned mattress where he can sleep and dream that he speaks French and English that he wears the best brands that he owns 24-karat gold bracelets that he has women to spare and drives a brand-new Mercedes drawn by the myth of the streets of gold Santiago Nasar arrives on rue Barclay and becomes a pusher in his pocket the niveous ecstasy...

Duanwad Pimwana’s battling couple abandon their boy to the neighborhood. Duanwad Pimwana reads “Monopoly” in Thai. Kampol Changsamran, a boy of five, was hanging around in front of Mrs. Tongjan’s tenement houses. His father had told him to wait: “You stay here. I’m taking your brother to Grandma’s. I’ll be back to get you in a bit.” Hearing these last three words, Kampol didn’t dare to wander far, worried his father...

Uthis Haemamool’s amnesiac temple worker recognizes the false side of true belief.  Before the Memory Shake-up Before his memory was shaken up, if you were to look inside that brainpan of his for something special, something different from what was in other people’s brains, his only unique memories would be the personal ones: deep, intimate memories of people close to him, and of relatives, but distant and unreliable when it came to people in general. You’d say that...

Japanese poet Takako Arai conjures an unvanquishable ghost, who literally left work undone. Video: Takako Arai and Jeffrey Angles read “Wheels” (credits below) A fire’s coming! It’ll be here soon! A female snake kept warning us For ages it lived in the storage above the closet We grew up hearing its voice Each time we laid out the bedding My sister and I could hardly stand it We’d lie anxiously in wait, temples pounding It’s coming! It’ll be...

Milanese journalist Gabriella Kuruvilla touches on the dynamics of motherhood and assimilation. I did it again today. I woke up, made breakfast, watched them eat and drink, bathed and dressed them, took them to school, returned home, got my sari, sandals, lipstick, kohl, makeup remover, rings, bangles, wrap, and Barbie. I put it all in my bag and went out. I always choose a different café on the long route from Lambrate to Bovisa. I prefer to walk, despite the time it takes....

Indian–born writer Laila Wadia writes a letter to her newborn son. I love draping myself in words, wearing metaphors, allegory, irony—but since you entered my life, my love, my favorite outfit is a silk cloak, the color of a fiery sunset, made entirely of silence. The soft folds make room for my thoughts, thoughts of a woman, a migrant, a mother, to flow through the warm, liquid womb, where language melts and becomes a primordial soup, and the only sound is the smile of the...

Marco Truzzi dives into the daily life of a boy living in a Romani camp. What’s the point of stars If you don’t want to see? —Romani proverb My father stopped being a gypsy in the spring of 1987. As for the hows and whys that led to his decision—or, according to his point of view, how this simply happened to him—we’ll get to that later. For the time being, all you need to know is that my father stopped being a gypsy when I was seven years old and he was...

German–born Eva Taylor considers the process of inhabiting a new land and a new language. Kleidleid...

In the following poem, Hajdari evokes Halil, the mythic character of the cycle of Albanian epic narrative poems (the Albanian Songs of the Frontier Warriors); Jutbina, a borderland between Albania and ex-Yugoslavia; and Bjeshkët e Nëmuna: the Cursed Mountains, as the northern Albanian Alps are called. I am leaving you Europe, corrupt old whore. Your ruins no longer enchant me, your mirrors and abysses have misled my exile, wounded my wretched body of the East in front of false...

And so the answer is revealed, to the riddle asked only once in a lifetime (one of the biggest questions in life, perhaps the biggest): your husband Chang Te-Mo will appear again after his death. What kind of ghost will he be? (And here it comes, here it comes, the question in return: “What kind of person was he?”) After the body is cleaned, it’s time to escort him to the morgue. You tell him, “Chang Te-Mo, it’s all right now.” For the last time, you...

(Night. Nadie, an Indonesian domestic worker, lies beneath a mosquito net with Granny, the woman she was employed to look after.) GRANNY:  Mosquitoes. NADIE:       I put up the net. There can’t be mosquitoes. GRANNY:   Mosquitoes! NADIE:       Argh! You’re doing this on purpose! GRANNY:   Ha ha! It’s my pak . . . pak . . . (She slaps a mosquito with each “pak.”)...

11-14 A tangerine sun gave my birdcage a ripe rinsing Its spacious temporary closure is uncommonly loud and clear Dead ringer for a dime   12-25 Fingertips are spark-tinted. Their milk contains one-percent fat Slow results. Delay dowager’s hump. Low-lying pain. A leaky fist. I am willing to carve you a ten-second slice of winter. 嘹亮的雨水有原諒的美 © Ye Mimi. By arrangement with the author....

A woman finally finds love, then has her dream date derailed. ONE Even when she looked in a mirror she had a smile on her face these days; when she went down the stairs there was practically a skip in her step, and now and again, a tune would come humming out of her. What you’ve given up hoping for counts twice as much, Kathleen had discovered. After her divorce, there’d been Emiel. He had Crohn’s disease. It hadn’t been officially diagnosed but he assumed he had...

The following is an excerpt from the new translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s magnum opus, Grande Sertão: Veredas, first published in English in 1963. That translation soon fell out of print for reasons that are not entirely clear. As translator Alison Entrekin explains in her introduction to the piece on our blog, “[t]o read Grande Sertão: Veredas for the first time in Portuguese is like setting foot in a foreign country where the...

“When are you going to write a book like Knife?” “Never, for sure.”   I was choosing the songs to put on the soundtrack of Lua Cambará when I came across the recordings of the spirituals commending the souls of the dead to God. Ten cassette tapes stored in a Styrofoam box. In the northeast of Brazil they still chant songs filled with religiosity during funeral celebrations. The women’s voices seemed to sprout up, beautiful and strange, up from...

Imaginary distances part from this spot, mirages which tell of the true distances between us. A man planted in front of the window is a ghost of himself suspended by improbable lines and colors. We are him and he is all of us as if we were yet the city around him. We are him and his slumped shoulders. We are him and his face gnawed by fish. We are him and the narrow streets that cut across him and stick through him like poles shackles and other senseless forms of nostalgia (like all forms...

Listen to Edival Lourenço read "Ephemeral Invention" in the original Brazilian Portuguese. After Ferreira Gullar It’s this body through which I discern myself a body made of flesh and desire of limestone and fuel of sap and ecstasy of clay and wind carbon fiber and shit. This body which, prone to dejection, at times boasts such grandeur such nobility a window onto my own illusions that, as I walk the streets, others anoint with the same name my mother gave me the one the...