Pride Month and our annual Queer issue arrive at a time of grief and rage. Already ravaged by the pandemic and the resulting financial devastation, the US erupted in fury over the brutal murder of George Floyd by police, protests which were soon duplicated around the world. As these three crises—health, economic, and racial justice—spur communities to take to the streets and demand action, we are reminded that Pride celebrations themselves grew out of the protests spearheaded by...

In this nonfiction excerpt, Chico Felitti tells the story of two Brazilian makeup artists who became famous for their radically altered appearances. The cemetery in São Bento, Araraquara, has a grave with no name. It’s the second tombstone in the fourth block on the left, if you walk in through the gate by the coconut-water stand. The family of the man buried there can't afford the R$140 (about $30) it takes to have a grave marker installed. But the man whose ashes rest...

In contemplative diary entries, Ricardo Romero records life in a locked-down Buenos Aires. 1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole is hardly the story we need, the law of gravity that prevents our world from dispensing of us), suddenly, then, we discover that making a bed, turning on a stove, regulating the temperature of the...

Introduction: Megacity Lockdown Coronavirus has thrived in megacities, determined to make it in the big smoke of the world’s densest urban hubs. It was in industrial Wuhan, now the most infamous megacity of them all, where tightly packed tower-block residents first showed signs of a new lung infection. New York and London, superstar cities, meccas for tourists, are now epicenters not of culture but mortality. The virus spread easily on their densely packed transport networks, their...

Last spring in Mexico City seems an eternity ago. The jacarandas were blooming. Each morning I would rise early, salute the raucous purple blossoms on the tree outside the window, brew coffee, then return to bed and read, while my companion, a large, gangly, deaf white cat named Cirilo kneaded my legs. I read mostly nonfiction by Mexican women who wrote with what I came to describe as an itinerant sensibility—essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and...

Mariana Oliver reflects on the intertwined relationship of language and migration in this essay about Turkish writer Emine Özdamar. In my language, tongue means language. The tongue does not have bones: it twists in the direction we twist it in. I sat tongue twisted in the city of Berlin. —Emine Sevgi Özdamar She moved to West Berlin at eighteen to work in one of the factories. Eyes accustomed to the colors of Istanbul; dark, thick hair. Though she wasn’t one for...

Karen Villeda tracks her journey through Eastern Europe in microessays that blend poetry and prose. Micro is the diminutive for something very small or a prefix derived from the Greek μ (mikró), meaning                         “small”:             as in microelectronics, microscope, microcast,             micrococcus,...

Writing from her cramped New York apartment, Jazmina Barrera finds solace in lighthouses, tracing their history and pondering their symbolism in this essay from her collection On Lighthouses. 44° 40’ 36.4” N 124° 4’ 45.9” W Yaquina Head Lighthouse. Brick tower painted white, 28 meters high. Original Fresnel lens, visible at 31 kilometers. Blink pattern: two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off.   Yaquina Head We...

Guo Jing, the first woman in China to win a gender discrimination case against a state-owned enterprise, chronicles daily life under the COVID-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China, in this excerpt from her Diary of the Wuhan Lockdown. April 3, 2020 Yesterday, the Wuhan COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters issued a notice advising that the city lockdown needs to be continued. Many citizens left messages on the Chinanews social media account requesting government...

In this essay, Kazakh writer Lilya Kalaus predicts what will happen when the COVID-19 quarantine comes to an end.   “Right, then, after the war, six in the evening!” Vodička shouted. "Maybe come at 6:30 instead, in case I’m running late,” answered Švejk. Vodička’s voice came again from far away. “You can’t make it at six?!” “Fine, I’ll be there at six!” came the response from Vodička’s...

Far from the sun of my home running to Africa running to Europe running to America running across the map running across the globe —Corsino Fortes, “Recode d’Umbertona” (Message to Umbertona)1 in Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), 1974 The Cabo Verde islands have been a historically important piece on the geopolitical chessboard, variously employed as a map reference point, a supply port, and a link between continents and coasts. The Cabo Verdean...

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida traces the formation of a new Cabo Verdean identity in this short essay. It was when I was in grade four that I learned that, in addition to being a Cabo Verdean from Boa Vista, I was also a Portuguese from Portugal. It was an extremely gratifying discovery. In the first place because we had just been learning that Portugal possessed numerous immense lands both within and beyond the seas, in Africa and in other parts of the world, and that...

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida reflects on his childhood discovery of the world beyond the Cabo Verdean islands in this short essay. In the days of my childhood we used to go and play around the edges of a grave that lay isolated nearly two kilometers from the small town of Sal Rei on the island of Boa Vista, and which we called the “Maria de Patingole” cemetery. We already knew how to read Portuguese relatively well, but this business of “Maria de...

Felipe Restrepo Pombo reflects on his quiet days of COVID-19 quarantine in Bogotá, normally one of the most bustling cities in Latin America. “If I was in hell I would always feel I had a chance of escaping.”  —Francis Bacon, in an interview with David Sylvester A few months ago I was invited to teach a course at a university in Indianapolis. After class I headed for the outskirts of that small American city, where I would be spending the first night...

This month’s feature brings together excerpts from three Arabic young adult novels in which young women defy expectations set by their families, society—and even themselves. While Arabic publishing has historically focused on literature for adults and young children, recent years have seen an increasing number of titles aimed at a young adult readership. “Since the middle of the last decade . . . tens of innovative novels for tweens and teens have started appearing...

Gonçalo M. Tavares tracks the COVID-19 pandemic in this stream-of-consciousness prose poem. NASA cancels lunar research. Matteo eats a forkful of pasta beside the window that looks over Vittorio De Sica street. Sica was the director of The Bicycle Thief. In Lombardy a woman is shouting for someone called Paolo. A sick man in a Lombardy hospital sees the faces of his wife and brother on an iPad held well up in the air by the white gloves of the doctor. The Marriott hotel is...

In the seventeen years Words Without Borders has been publishing, this is only the second issue dedicated specifically and exclusively to writing for children, and the first since November 2004. I can well understand the delay—children are not WWB’s main constituency of readers, after all. But I’ve been keen to work with them on this issue for a while, not only because children’s writing has been even more neglected for translation in the Anglophone world than its...

As the world battles the COVID-19 virus, Words Without Borders is commissioning new work from contributors all over the world to offer humanistic perspectives on and literary responses to the crisis. We published the first piece, from Italian writer Silvia Ranfagni, on Monday, March 16, when the extent of the wreckage this coronavirus would leave in its wake was just becoming clear. Check back often for new selections of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to...

Arabic literary traditions are rich with women telling their own stories, from Andalusian Wallada bint al-Mustakfi’s fakhr poetry—allegedly embroidered on her clothes—through the epistolary practice of Nahda writers like Mayy Ziyadeh to the autobiographies of feminist pioneers Huda al-Shaarawi and Nawal al-Saadawi, as well as the memoirs of established literary authors such as Radwa Ashour and Samar Yazbek. In this feature, we bring you a small selection of...

Content warning: this piece contains descriptions of female circumcision that may be upsetting. Writer Ishraga Mustafa recounts her experience of genital mutilation in this excerpt from her autobiography. Things didn’t stay as the toy boats of my childhood would have wished; unrestrained and free, I used to play with the boys in the street . . . the skies would open and pour down, and we would amuse ourselves to the hilt. The taming began the day I heard them, the women,...