“An advanced modern reader acts like a detective. In the forest of books, he can follow the clues and discover the enormous treasures underlying them. Those books give him messages: his inner concentrated essence receives the messages and immediately produces new ones. These blended messages lead him to enter a tunnel of the spirit, and in that place he begins a great exploration.” These are the words of Can Xue (from her essay titled “'The Fair-Haired...

Humans are, in essence, not much more than highly developed mammals. We are scientifically classifiable by Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, just like the pine tree and the bark beetle. Human intelligence has led our species to marvelous zeniths of technology and an ability to survive in the most punishing habitats imaginable. Yet, just as crucial as respiration and physical endurance are the tasks of reproduction and cooperation. Humans are a social species, but the question of...

He lives in several worlds simultaneously. —Juan José Saer, La Grande   In the opening pages of La Grande, the final, unfinished novel by Juan José Saer, the writer from Santa Fe who lived most of his life—and died—in Paris, Willi Gutiérrez has returned to Argentina after thirty years abroad. His return is shrouded in mystery, and the observation above is both a reference to Gutiérrez’s past—which, rumor has it, constituted a...

In this 2014 essay, Marcelo Cohen reflects back on decades as a translator in Spain and the complex relationship between translation, exile, and identity.   This text takes as its starting point another that I wrote once for a talk on exile and Argentine literature. But don’t think I’m simply trying to make things easier on myself. Remembering Joyce’s famous motto, “silence, exile, and cunning,” I briefly considered as a title for this chronicle: "On the...

In this essay, literary and cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo takes on the longstanding myth that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America.   Among the many commonplaces about Buenos Aires, I’ll mention but two. The first panders to the Argentinean ego and is especially inaccurate: Buenos Aires resembles Paris. The second was a criticism that could be heard for decades from the mouths of these same Argentineans who would drive themselves into a frenzy imagining themselves heirs of...

A document of injustice, memorializing the names, professions, and ages of those who perished—many who were buried in unmarked graves. A celebrated modernist novel about a neurasthenic elevator operator, detailing the refugee experience in mid-century Manhattan. And a four-volume chronicle about the lives of the slachta, the Polish-speaking noblemen and noblewomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, impeccably researched by an historian,...

In this excerpt from her memoir, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė recalls the 1941 Soviet deportation to Siberia of thousands of Lithuanians and their harsh lives as slave laborers. I am sitting in the dock along with the five others on trial for stealing boards from the storeroom. Across from us, at a table with five lighted candles and covered with red felt, sits the magistrate, an eighteen-year-old Yakut. An inspector by profession, he was ordered to preside by the Party. It must have...

“[T]o be humanly would be to be charged with humanity comma, with humanity humans and animals, proliferating oneself while exceeding one’s limits, moving out in front and anticipating us. It would be or It will be? […] For me, to find oneself human in Humanity has been forever, before any knowledge and any reading, to find oneself a rather lame dog, mole, shrew, eagle, girl, brother, lover, simultaneously, born at the same time, born several and several times. I had...

Latvia is a small country of two million inhabitants in northeastern Europe, a relatively inconspicuous place on the map. The country is celebrating its centenary this year, with a host of events, including Latvia’s participation as one of the Market Focus countries at the London Book Fair, putting its culture in the spotlight. The history of Latvian literature spans several hundred years; its most recent chapter, however, began when Latvia declared the restoration of...

Welcome to our twelfth graphic novel issue, and to our annual celebration of this endlessly expressive genre. Though much of the art here may be in black and white, the topics addressed are anything but. In settings ranging from the bowels of a 1960s German lab to an antiseptic future Sweden, and with characters as diverse as rural bigots and urbane aesthetes, the pieces here explore the challenges of life in a variety of locations and eras. Some revisit the past, both personal and...

Kazakhstan is the largest country by landmass to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union aside from Russia itself, but it has had an undersized impact on world literature. Its rich oral storytelling tradition has so far gone largely unrecorded outside the Kazakh and Russian languages. When we take into account that the region has had very little experience as an independent state but a centuries-long history of colonialism—Mongolian, Russian, and most recently Soviet—we...

Zira Naurzbayeva pays homage to an older generation of women struggling to make the transition from village communities to urban living in contemporary Kazakhstan. Listen to Zira Naurzbayeva reading an excerpt from "The Beskempir" in Russian.   The roar, filled with anger and a hot wrath, changed into a long, sad howl. My horror was quickly replaced by doubt, because that scream had sounded on a sunny summer day in Academgorodok, somewhere among the brand-new, pink...

Not long after I returned to work following the birth of my baby, I was reading the news during my morning commute when I came upon a sentence containing the verb “to cling.” It wasn’t a sentence to savor or reread, just a description of something happening in the background. But I was unable to move forward. My eyes teared up, my heart raced, my body reacted to this word. During those early weeks of nurturing a tiny, clinging baby, an otherwise commonplace verb had taken...

Acclaimed writer and translator Cécile Oumhani introduces our December issue featuring contemporary writing by Tunisian women.   What do Tunisian women write today? It is now almost seven years since the people of Tunisia put an end to dictatorship. And it is over sixty years since Tunisian women obtained a status women in neighboring countries are still dreaming of. What could be achieved at the time of the Arab Spring was in many ways the result of the high degree of...

Arunava Sinha introduces the four stories in our December feature exploring Bollywood’s debt to Bengali writers.   India's Hindi film industry is the largest in the world in terms of the number of films released. Derivatively named Bollywood (B for Bombay—now Mumbai— where most Hindi movies are made), it produces movies placed everywhere on the continuum between the avowedly commercial—complete with the song and dance routines that American...

At first glance, this month's issue may seem not merely at odds with our usual approach, but completely contrary to it. Why is a magazine specializing in international literature translated into English publishing an issue of writing from the US? In fact, this issue is not a departure but a continuation: in demonstrating the vital importance of reading and learning about the world outside our borders, it confirms the renewed urgency of our efforts in the face of disturbing political and...

A woman whose world suddenly expands. A journey toward the island that takes a tragic turn. A knife pulled on a train. Each of the stories chosen for this feature presents us with characters in the midst of what are to them life-altering situations. Written by Norwegian authors recognized as masters of the craft, each story also captures, in different ways, but with equal precision, life’s essential experiences. That is to say, though it is important to emphasize that each situation...

Marco Avilés grapples with questions of difference and discrimination for immigrants in Peru and the US in this essay from his book No soy tu cholo, published in Peru by Debate, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. An earlier version appeared originally in Ojo Publico. An American couple relocated to Lima and opened a hamburger joint in one of the city’s culinary hotspots: the formidable Calle Dante, in Surquillo, a neighborhood full of...

A near-death experience prompts an argument between a couple on the nature of hell in this piece from Chinese author Zhang Xinxin.   It wasn’t the first time that Steve and I had talked about the next life. But this time I actually bared my soul. The red and blue lights of the police car were flashing. The ambulance siren wailed. I was strapped to the stretcher, my body all mashed up. But my mind was intact, and I was fully conscious—to the extent that I was...

In this short essay, Burmese activist Khet Mar finds herself caught in storms raging in both the US and Myanmar.   Listen to Khet Mar reading "The Sound of Snow" in Burmese.   I woke up one late night in March to the sounds of howling wind and tree branches banging on my bedside windowpanes. As I rose from bed, lifted the curtain, and looked outside, I watched the saltlike snow as it hissed across ryegrass in the backyard lawn. There was an extraordinary...