The release of the Hollywood film The Mauritanian earlier this year made a harrowing tale of torture and injustice at Guantánamo Bay the first Mauritanian story to truly reach the world. When the book the film was based on—Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi—came out in 2015, there were only three books written by Mauritanian authors available in English.[1] The number of Mauritanian works which had been translated into other languages or won regional literary...

Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, to greater or lesser degrees of success. I was not apprehensive when translators began turning the novel into other languages—into Spanish or German or Dutch, for example. Rather, the prospect gratified me. But when it came to replicating this particular book, conceived and written in Italian, into the language that I...

"Brazil's Virginia Woolf." "Sebaldian." An heir to Flaubert, Stendhal, Sterne . . . Comps—or comparative titles/authors—are ubiquitous in publishing, particularly when it comes to international literature. They are intended as a guide for publishers, readers, booksellers, critics, publicity teams: situating new works and writers in the context of the well-known, it is thought, can help these new works succeed. It is common among all of the aforementioned groups at...

In 1866, Claude Monet—at the insistence of Gustave Courbet—made a figurative painting of his lover Camille Doncieux, who would later become his first wife, dressed in a dazzling green silk dress. The way he captured the slightly stiff and radiating hues, shades, and nuances of the silk made Camille simultaneously a mythical and a modern woman. She is of the old and the new times. In 1936, Amrita Sher-Gil painted an almost melancholic portrait of her cousin, Sumair,...

Comparable titles, or comps, are a widely used way to describe books throughout the publishing process, from an agent’s pitch all the way to the sale of the finished book. The first time I was asked “What are the comps?” I had to ask for clarification. I had been working in Spain, where books are also widely compared to other books, but where there isn’t a nice short term for it. “Comps,” with its abbreviated zing, sounds like an essential part of the...

GOTO WARD SENT ROPY thef utur ecan goto hell andm eltt here huma nkin dcan goto thef utur ethe nrot   infa rawa yice land thet ribe obse rves asag laci erde cays thes amea sape rson   sinc eice land only bear ssan dand rock itca nnot care less ifli feis thri ving   when iwas five isaw atow erin ggla cier that late rdro wned amon gthe drif tice   Kári Tulinius trans. Larissa Kyzer   It was about four years ago, during the last summer I...

No doubt a few Galicians will think it in very bad taste to inaugurate this issue with a likeness to their higher profile southern neighbors, but because there may be a great many glad for the comparison, I can hardly imagine a better point of entry to the little-known trove that is Galician literature. Indeed, ever since the independence of Portugal in 1143 from the Spanish Kingdom of León, and the subsequent split of their common vulgar tongue, debate has raged over just where (and...

In her quarterly column, Maya Jaggi, our Critic at Large, provides a brief history of Georgian letters, whose influences look east and west. Jaggi has curated Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern: Where Europe Meets Asia, an online festival of Georgian writers inspired by the café culture of Georgia’s first democratic republic of 1918–21, taking place online from February 25 to 28.  In a little park with soaring fir trees behind the old parliament...

Young, formally inventive, and digital by nature—these are only some of the characteristics of Russophone literature today. Here, we present Russophone writers born in 1985 or later who work in shorter genres, from minimalistic flash fiction and protest poetry to visual performance. This issue is not a collection of “Russian literature” because many of its contributors are not ethnically Russian, and many are not Russian nationals. What they have in common is their use of...

This month, WWB took a look back at some of the important writing on race and racism to be found in the magazine's archives. In the wake of 2020's racist violence, and subsequent organizing by the Black Lives Matter movement and others to combat white supremacy, literary magazines and publishers everywhere have, to differing degrees, made efforts to publish more Black writers. But as some Black writers and editors have pointed out, it is equally as important that we evaluate...

Institutional transformation often begins at the grassroots, argues translator and editor Aaron Robertson as he considers a roadmap for bringing Black writers and translators into an industry in which they are statistically underrepresented. Over the last year and a half, since the publication of my first translated book, I’ve felt it necessary to preface my conversations with aspiring translators by telling them that I know less than they think. This isn’t necessarily a...

Drawing on examples from the US and Haiti, author Évelyne Trouillot considers how Anglophone publishers can better represent the complex and diverse contexts from which Black authors around the world are published in translation.   In 1979, Octavia Butler’s widely read novel Kindred, was published in the United States. The novel tells of a young African-American woman living in California in 1976 who travels back and forth through time. Toggling between 1976 and the years...

Sandra Tamele, publisher of Mozambique-based Editora Trinta Nove Zero, argues that better publishing Black writers from around the world begins with increased support, locally and globally, for Africa-based literary projects. It’s amazing how simple events can trigger a turning point in one’s journey. Mine was a few years ago when, while listening to the radio at work, I came across a podcast about Ann Morgan, a British author who went on a quest to find and read books from...

Our annual January archive issue this year comes at a moment of urgency: in two weeks, the US’s first Black vice president, Kamala Harris, will be sworn in, after four years of divisive politics in which racism figured heavily. Less than a year after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor led to renewed Black Lives Matter protests and a reckoning across American society, literary publishers—including this magazine—are seeking to address the deficit of Black writers...

There is a legend about a Persian traveler who comes to an Afghan village in search of a good poet. First, he visits the shopkeeper who tells him he is a poet but that the farmer is a better one; then the farmer sends the visitor to the tailor, assuring him that he is really the best poet in the village. And on it goes. Poetry, memoir, fables, proverbs, and stories sit at the heart of Afghanistan, a nation founded by a poet, Ahmad Shah Abdali (also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani), and the...

Why is it so hard to find the work of Sudanese women in English translation? Yes, there is Leila Aboulela, who writes in English, but if asked about other female Sudanese writers, one would probably struggle to name them. Some might reason that there just aren’t many Sudanese women writing. This assumption has led to anthologies and online publications focused on Sudanese literature in which female-authored works make up less than thirty percent of their contents; more general...

Our November 2020 issue, the second part of our double issue of writing on the climate crisis that began last month, coincides with an inauspicious date: as of November 4, 2020, Donald Trump has made official the United States’ breach of its commitment to the landmark 2015 Paris accord on climate change, the second time in two decades that the US agreed to and then failed to honor its commitments to an international climate pact. The protagonist of this month’s work is, by and...

As I write, the West Coast of the US is ravaged by wildfires; the Gulf Coast, still recovering from Hurricane Laura, braces for Hurricane Sally’s potential destruction; an enormous chunk of Greenland’s icecap has broken free; the Northern Hemisphere has sweated through the hottest summer on record—and that’s just today. Temperatures swing between extremes, violent weather becomes the norm. In this daunting context, we present a double issue of writing on...

Andri Snær Magnason travels to the Snæfellsjökull glacier in Iceland and contemplates environmental responsibility, collective action, and hope in the face of global warming.   In the future, glaciers will be an alien phenomenon, rare as a Bengal tiger. Having lived in the time of the white giants will become swaddled in a fairytale glow, like having stroked a dragon or handled the eggs of the great auk. Glaciers will certainly be found in the Arctic, Greenland, and...

Environmental writer Amy Brady considers the role of literature in prompting action against climate change.   In early June of 2020 the Yakutia region of Siberia hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the permafrost to melt and the dry soil beneath to burst into flames. Thick white smoke spread across the country’s green expanse, releasing more carbon emissions into the atmosphere than any other wildfire on Earth in the last two decades. These fires are a clear sign that the...