A routine day turns suddenly violent in this excerpt from Rania Mamoun’s novel Son of the Sun.   Words Without Borders · Rania Mamoun Reads "في المقهى" ("At the Coffee Shop") Listen to Rania Mamoun read "At the Coffee Shop" in the original Arabic.   The frenzied football fan banged on the table with a force that knocked the tea over. One glass shattered as it hit the ground. He shot up, angrily screaming at...

Ann El Safi presents a bird’s-eye view of violence and unrequited love.   Words Without Borders · Ann El Safi reads "حرية الطيران" ("Freedom of Flight") Listen to Ann El Safi read "Freedom of Flight" in the original Arabic.   Your days are swallowed by the road, your feet yearn for freedom. The smell of absence seeps into the carnage around me. She has left her bedroom window open. The wall...

The residents of Al-Nar Street coexist with demons and djinns from a nearby swamp in this excerpt from Zeinab Belail’s novel The Cactus Plant.   Words Without Borders · Zeinab Belail reads "شارع النار" ("Al-Nar Street") Listen to Zeinab Belail read "Al-Nar Street" in the original Arabic.   Al-Nar Street is one of the longest streets that any of the city’s residents has ever set foot in. Long and...

Spending the night at a women’s prison where she is covering a conference, a journalist wakes from an inexplicable dream in this excerpt from Amna al-Fadl’s novel Some of What Happened Between Us. Basma switched off the tape recorder and fell into a deep sleep. But she soon awoke, terrified, and drew the curtains back from the window overlooking the prison courtyard. She could discern nothing in the pitch dark but the whistling of the winter winds and the trembling of her hands...

A young woman is captivated by a mysterious book about the history of the Nile as she searches for a disappeared friend in this excerpt from Sarah Al-Jack’s novel The Mites.  I flipped through a small booklet with a worn-out cover. The title was covered in the white marks of a corrector pen. Beneath it was a drawing of the Nile, from its source to where it drains into the Mediterranean. The first page was torn out; there was no author name, no mention of a publishing house or...

In this excerpt from his novel Quantas madrugadas tem a noite (How many dawns has the night), Ondjaki gives us a farcical view of urban catastrophe provoked by human folly. Then lemme take a step back to fill you in on the whole business: we started with the tick because now I know it came from the tick, but nobody knew at the time, you get my drift? Take it easy, there’s no confusion, there’s a whole bunch of different confusions: first, the dead man had...

In this excerpt from her novel Tsunami Blues, Markéta Pilátová traces the reverberations of the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia back to the Czech Republic. Music for the old lady Small Town Moravia, December 26, 2004 His memories, his “pictures from the tropics,” included these kinds of images, too. This was how they ran from hurricanes, back in Cuba such a long time ago, or from surreal, torrential rains that would flush away most of...

A father and daughter’s strained relationship comes to a head in a world devastated by drought in Spanish writer Ariadna Castellarnau’s dystopian short story.   Father wants to teach me to conjure water with his staff, like he does. This is his gift, and he wants it to be mine. Every morning, the same thing. The scene is reiterated on the slope in front of the house: “Take the staff,” he tells me, “trust me, it doesn’t bite, now lift it and stroke...

In this short story by Thai novelist Duanwad Pimwana, a man searches for hope and companionship in a world of trash.   My mother and father disappeared amid the trash. My siblings and relatives, too, one by one. I have nobody. Trash is everywhere around me: the ground, the hollows, the hills are all trash. It doesn’t matter where I look, or how far, I see nothing but an unending series of overlapping mountains, trash upon trash. Trees have been flattened, homes have collapsed,...

In this short story by Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro, a selfless man gives himself entirely to his work. I One sunny May afternoon, a little man arrived in the city, and not just the city, but an office on the third floor of the Ministry of Education, in search of an official, a distant relation of his family, who would help him and get him work, was what he’d been told back home. Attired in his best clothes—a white shirt, clean pants, patent leather shoes, and a...

A Chinese immigrant to Peru refuses to give up tradition in this short story by Siu Kam Wen. When Lou1 Chen, loan shark and owner of a fleet of eighteen urban minibuses, managed to amass his first fifteen million, he had a luxurious mansion built in Monterrico and moved there with his Peruvian wife, their two sons, and his elderly mother. The two-story house measured 2,300 square feet and included a spacious front yard and a backyard with a pool. Two imposing German shepherds guarded the...

Cristy, the narrator of Tilsa Otta’s novel The Golden Children of Sexual Alchemy, experiences otherworldly orgasms with her partner: not only do they make her see God, they also give her visions of the future. Her curiosity about this “gift,” its purpose, and how it might properly be deployed prompt her to research the world of erotic spirituality. Here she offers notes from her fieldwork.  Frozen with One Foot in the Air After leaving Cosmos, I make...

In this short piece, Milton Hatoum writes a letter from the future chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic in Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil. I was twelve years old in April of the year 2020. At that time, drones did not yet deliver our food, nor was such a varied menu of pastilles on offer, each of which now holds the flavors, spices, and proteins one once found in a plate of food, and which leave us with the impression that we are eating as well as we ever have. Though it might be puzzling to...

A woman is nursed back to health by an acquaintance in this excerpt of Libuše Moníková's Verklärte Nacht, forthcoming next year from Karolinum Press. The man is back, trying to be quiet. I watch him, he squints over at me, and I play dead, pretending to sleep. There’s no more heat, no more seething blood. The slow, monotonous flowing of thin blood through blue veins, for three hundred years. I hear him rustling shopping bags in the kitchenette, turning...

Xirú by Damián Cabrera is a multilingual lyric novel set in Ciudad del Este—a Paraguayan city in the Triple Frontier shared with Argentina and Brazil. The title refers to the Portuguese word of Guaraní origin used by Brazilians to refer to Paraguayans at the border, which shifts from meaning “friend” to “invader” or “fool.” The novel is written predominantly in Spanish but is interlaced with Portuguese and Guaraní,...

A couple takes a drastic step after discovering their daughter’s relationship with another woman in this short story by Nazli Karabiyikoglu. I. Elfiye was planning to invite her friend over at some point, which she more or less had to do, actually. Pelin had lured her into it by asking all those questions about her family, and now she was caught in her trap. Elfiye waited a week, putting Pelin off until the day her stepmother met with her friends to give each other gold. These Gold...

A man’s unusual tattoos attract international attention in this short story by R. Joseph Dazo. The first question most of them ask when they see my skin is “Why?” I often respond with a smile. Sometimes, my face turns hot. I can’t figure out if I’m annoyed or embarrassed. When I try to answer, I stutter, unable to finish a phrase so that they’ll understand. My armpits dampen. My forehead sweats. How I want to say to them, “This is art. This has...

A man tries to honor his dead lover’s final wish in this short story by Juan Carlos Cortázar. You went back to him. The last months of his life, that’s how he said it, no embellishment. You went back—a year earlier you’d been the one to leave, you’re a piece of shit, you’d shouted—and the two of you made up. If it were HIV, even, he’d have more of a chance, but with this, no, nothing, a few months and that’s it, he said, and you...

A queer love triangle revolves around the music of Schubert in this short story by Natalia Rubanova. Intermezzo Annette sneaks: got to be quiet, quiet as a mouse, a mouse! Careless, better to keep to the left, the left, no pillows there—c u r i o u s: is he really sleeping or just pretending, and if he is, God have mercy, again? Annette tries not to think—not to think about that. Annette knows—there, in the silver Honda, decorating the darkness with all...

The COVID-19 pandemic prompts a middle-aged woman to reconnect with a part of her past in this short story by Yishai Sarid. I remember almost nothing about him. So many people have passed through my life since then, and he was no more than a marginal episode, a transient character. I never paid him any real attention before. And yet here I am, thirty years later, going to meet him. I recall the way he addressed me in one of his old letters: “My love, my gorgeous.” I may have...