Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence.   Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in Denmark remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục bát...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

A frustrated wife and mother finds life in a fishbowl instructive in this story translated from the Mongolian.   I've been in here for exactly one year. My once fair and delicate skin, the envy of all the other ladies, has hardened into scales mottled with red and pink splotches. A year, exactly one year. People have thought that I have been a fish for exactly one year. Regardless of what other people say, what really matters to me is that three hundred and sixty-five...

After years of abuse at the hands of their higher-caste neighbors, a Dalit community takes action and finds sweet revenge.   Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   A haze of shock and terror swam before the eyes of everyone in the village. Women began to shriek. A look of outrage welled up in some pairs of eyes. Jaws clenched in anger. Even those whose elderly eyes had gone dark felt something untoward had happened. The village erupted in...

Erdene Seng's short story reveals the fate of one stubborn member of a community in transition.   Our people began to move from our homeland at the beginning of spring. Old man Dash would remember that day for the rest of his life. Dash sat by the pile of firewood near his ger. He watched as, almost like a spring mirage, a mass of animals and carts moved haphazardly along the near side of the southern mountain, with horsemen galloping in all directions. Dash saw this and...

In "Vengeance," Norov Dalkhaa weaves a Mongolian Buddhist folk legend that dogs have the reincarnated souls of humans into an urban parable of sex, jealousy, and violence.   Listen to Norov Dalkhaa read "Vengeance" in the original Mongolian.     The black dog's large brown eyes drew Chuluun's attention. They didn't seem to be dog's eyes at all. The dog stared at Demchig, not even moving when Chuluun waved his hands and feet at it. Uzmee looked as fragile...

In this short story, a taunted shopkeeper's son finds his scorned background is his entree to a corporate career.    Although his name wasn’t Gujji to begin with, he was Gujji now. Before he was even aware of it, it was as if his ears had absorbed this slur on his identity. First given to him in school, the name had already cooked through by the time he was a boy in the alleys of the neighborhood, much like the sausages boiled and hung from his...

Even though it is a private institution, Arya Balika Vidyalaya receives funding from the government. The school, therefore, is obliged to adhere to government regulations. One dictates that all the reserved posts in the school must be filled through the appointment of reserved category candidates. Regardless, for the last two years, the reserved post for a T.G.T. (Trained Graduate Teacher) for science has remained empty. The new semester is supposed to begin in April. The school principal...

Um mmm mm ma oh oh oh . . . oh Mama . . . oh Mama . . . oh Mama . . . I woke with a start when I heard the noise. “Oh my god . . . oh my god . . .,” the sound of a woman crying, or maybe being beaten, was floating in the air. There was a fair amount of light in the room, but nonetheless I turned on the side table lamp. Just at that moment I turned it on there was a final Aah! and then complete silence. It was my second day in Greece. I was staying on...

The human embryo has a special status because of its potential for development to a stage at which everyone would accord it the status of a human person. —The Warnock Committee (U.K.), Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology, 1984   Children born by artificial insemination will also be problematic, for their lives have developed as a result of the destruction of numerous embryos. —Patriarch Ilia II of Georgia, Christmas Epistle, January 2014   Listen to...

Naira Gelashvili eavesdrops on the beginning of a star-crossed affair Listen to author Naira Gelashvili read this story in the original Georgian.   I entered the tower. I didn’t stop in the front room, but took her to the second room. Here, long wooden benches stood on the right and left, and along the middle wall—a wooden bench, covered in bedding. A window was cut out of the fourth wall.     I was enveloped by a good mood, which I think came...

In the end, one sentence awaits us all—death  Joseph Brodsky   Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We are all on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it. Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream   God inscribed my grief  On my sword I killed the man I’d sworn to be a brother to I used a sword on my brother They are chasing me to murder me They put a trap for me on the road Folk song   Listen to author Beka...

Panamanian writer Melanie Taylor Herrera looks on as two assassins kill time at a nightclub​.   Two men head for the table in front of the dance floor. They sit down in the aluminum chairs silently and in unison. The man wearing the skintight black shirt orders two drinks. The bar is empty. It’s almost nine on a Wednesday night—a lazy night that slips through the waitresses’ and bartender’s fingers like thick wet sand. The men watch the few...

Panamanian writer Cheri Lewis observes a household inexplicably deluged with infants.   The babies started arriving that summer. I remember the first one so well. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when, in the mirror, I spotted the reflection of a shadow making its way down the hall. I leaned out the door and saw a baby, naked and covered in dirt. He crawled right down the center of the living room and headed straight for my sister, who was sitting on the couch, reading a book....

An anxious woman awaits her lover in Panamanian writer Carlos Oriel Wynter Melo’s exploration of jealousy and doubt​ If you look at the park head on, stare straight at it, look with more than your eyes, imagining it or linking it to a memory, you’ll see a tunnel of trees that ends in a hole of light. If your gaze is colored by some melancholy thought, that spot of light might suggest several interpretations. One possibility is that everything comes to an end. On the...

An ambitious young woman learns the hideous secret behind the success of her cutthroat Macanese company in Eric Chau’s tale, illustrated by Chi-Wai Un.   There was once a little fishing port, nestled between two little hills. On the eastern hill was a lighthouse, its beam piercing the stillness of the night, lighting up the west. One day, the fishing port started to change. All kinds of skyscrapers began to spring up, blocking the hills. The lighthouse disappeared from view....