Whenever he comes to Paris, he calls immediately. "My friend,'' his voice explodes, "Why don't you come have lunch with me?" Now he's the owner of a neat, tranquil apartment right in the heart of Montparnasse. Inside, everything's dressed in light colors and seems to be organized with order and taste: English leather chairs, Wifredo Lam's engravings, a magnificent stereo, and always, always, a crystal vase in the library, with recently cut yellow roses. "They...

When it comes to countries that have been locked away—or locked out of—the Western world, Westerners tend to believe that little happens there during the time that they are not paying attention. Like trees that fall in the middle of the forest without someone to witness them, third world countries like Libya must undergo some kind of comatose existence when the West stops looking at them, or so Westerners believe. The reader of these selections from Libya will quickly become...

They meet every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday morning in front of the newspaper shop, where they discuss concerns of the day, most of them too old to remember their exact age, the years only evident by their wrinkled and parched faces, their trembling hands. Some blow their noses, some chew tobacco and some smoke, drawing at their cigarettes with great effort. Haj Bu-Zaid sneezes, looks at the locked door of the newspaper shop and says, the scoundrel is late. Perhaps he tripped over his...

The village follows a never-changing script: Things are today exactly as they were yesterday, which is the same as they were the day before, and a year before that. There is Omran, dutifully executing his daily chores, drawing water from the well using a bucket raised by a beast of burden. Now he's tossing daily feed to his livestock. Now he's moving back and forth with an ox, cutting a furrow in the ground. From the mountains through which so many tomorrows pass floats a sweet...

Nachtigall, Liebe, Herz, you can read Heine without the help of a dictionary," he said. And he enjoyed the possibilities German allowed of making up words, as Goethe's Nebelglanz, "the glimmer of the fog." He would let the words resound in the room: "Füllest wieder Busch und Thal still mit Nebelglanz *Š." He praised the transparency of the language, and he reproached Heidegger for having invented what he called "an incomprehensible dialect of German." He loved...

To my wife and children I dedicate these pages of Corsica (to my teammate go my thanks). TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This slender collection consists of glimpses, less essays than reminiscences, of places Jean-Philippe Toussaint has traveled, often for readings or as the literary member in a group of French cultural emissaries. These locales, which include Kyoto, Hanoi, Prague, and Berlin, among others, serve as occasions for the author to sketch eccentricities in both his setting and...

A writer friend of mine told me that a few weeks ago he had had to exclude the most gifted of his students, a young man from Swabia or Baden or Württemberg - neither he nor I can really tell these regions apart - with the significant name of Stefan Hegel, from the course for young writers he had been invited to give by a foundation with connections to a large corporation, because this Hegel kept on interrupting the readings of the texts under discussion, sometimes raising objections...

Invited to guest edit an anthology of Mexican fiction, initial enthusiasm soon gave way to ennui: twelve or so spots to fill, and twenty-five or so obligatory and obvious names comprised my first list. What's the fun of doing the anthology if you can't do the unexpected and make room for some surprise choices and, hopefully, introduce some exciting young writers who few in this country, and even Mexico, have encountered before? Simply to whittle the field down, I decided not to...

After having spent his childhood doing comic strips and his youth doing animated cartoons, Mickey Mouse finally discovered his true vocation as a corporate insignia. In heraldic times, only mythological creatures or rampant beasts could aspire to adorn a coat of arms. In the century of the cartoon, it's only natural that the Magic Kingdom's logo is a rodent with gloved hands. Like the Mercedes star or the McDonald's golden arches, Mickey is a registered trademark. At this...

For years my grandfather treated his cataracts with Cineraria maritime, a therapy recommended by his friend Chiunti, el Licenciado. I don't know what cineraria is-most likely a plant. I admire, however, the prosodic beauty of its name. Cineraria maritime. The fact that I still remember it after all this time compels me to suppose that my savoring words dates back to those remote years of my childhood. The cineraria ophthalmic drops came in a little amber vial with a rubber...

He wraps his left fist around the shot of bourbon. Then types, with his free index finger. "It can be dangerous to say madre in Mexico." His warning peppered with laughter. "I don't know how I can explain this to you, but expressions with madre in them are fuertes, powerful." Underscored, italicized, emblazoned across the screen. A kind of watch-out fuerte. Like a blow to the face. Or a bulldozer. "Madre?" I'll ask him. "The noun, mother?" "Esas madres." Those mothers, he replies,...

As the largest Arabic-speaking country (at 70+ million inhabitants and counting), Egypt, with its teeming capital of Cairo, plays a disproportionately large role in the intellectual and cultural life of the Arab world. From the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s to the Islamist movement of today, Egypt has always been at the forefront of new ideas in the region. But while Egypt is very much part of a greater Arabic-speaking literary and cultural milieu, Egyptians are also keenly...

NOTE: As a young doctor studying in Kiev in 1986, Mohamed Makhzangi found himself in the midst of a public health catastrophe when the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down that spring. The longer work from which this excerpt is taken is an "anti-memoir," as he puts it, of his impressions as both an outsider and a victim. Through an array of brief vignettes, snippets of conversations, and fragmentary encounters, he convincingly conveys the mounting panic at the time, the loneliness of...

In the history of Islam, perhaps no woman has been as widely (mis)interpreted as Zulaikha—the beautiful and perfidious wife of Potiphar in the story of Joseph. It was she who tried to seduce Joseph into the whirl of adultery and unbridled hedonism. It was she who upon being rejected by Joseph accused him of raping her, thus causing him to be incarcerated for years in the terrible dungeons of Potiphar's regime. And it was she who has over and over been blamed, condemned, and...

From time to time, climbers ascending Mt. Everest or Nanga Parbat stumble upon migrating birds, frozen on snow-capped peaks at 8,000-meter altitudes. The cross-continental flight formation these birds launched in the northern tundra of Canada passes straight through the heart of the Asian Continent. The migrating birds pass over the Himalayas to reach the Adrian Sea, off southern India. The exhausted ones fall and die in Himalayan whirlwind on snow-covered mountain tops, while others...

Note: The work was written originally in Yucatecan Maya, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico. Miguel Angel May May, the writer and cultural leader, has been responsible for the formation of organizations of Maya writers and scholars and is responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in the language and culture on the Yucatán peninsula. Many other people work with him, including professors at the Autonomous University of Yucatán such as Alejandra...

Author's note Ernesto Sábato's novel Abaddón el exterminador (1974) includes a dense epistolary chapter addressed to a virtual fellow writer, which begins "Dear, distant young man..." This response (published March 20, 1984, in the Romanian literary monthly Vatra) borrows ideas, themes, and even expressions from that and other novels by Ernesto Sábato, using them as references for a publicly declared solidarity. But the "open letter" to...

Should Americans read more world literature to rip away the blinders we so often wear when it comes to those who are "not like us"? "Yes" is the quick answer, the answer that salves our collective conscience, but it is that word should that has begun to bother me. Should has not gathered as many dedicated readers of works in translation as, well, as it should have. The proof is in the numbers. In the April 23 edition of the New York Times, an article by Dinitia Smith on PEN World...

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), the Alexandrian Greek poet whose poetry dazzled E. M. Forster and cast a haunting, luminous glow over Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, left us some of the most outspoken homoerotic poems. They bristle with desire, with the anguish of desire, and desire recollected in tranquility. Yet, for all their candor, many of these poems are shot through with something far more poignant than desire: regret: regret for love lost, for loves that could have been...

If he hadn't been who he was, I never would have married again. I had everything: a child, a job, my freedom. And suddenly there he was . . . clumsy, practically blind, wheezing. Letting someone into your world with so much baggage—twelve years in Stalinist camps, they took him as a boy, sixteen years old. . . . With the burden of that knowledge . . . the differences. That's not what I'd call freedom. What is it? What's the point? Admit that I only pitied him? No. It...