To anyone who regularly gets stuck in the news cycle, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature may seem somewhat overdue. Migration issues have received an increasing amount of media coverage over the past several years, often within a context of violence and disasters, as the number of refugees and asylum seekers worldwide hit record highs. Stories of migration are usually presented using imagery meant to provoke strong, and often contradictory, emotional responses. The picture...

  In the first entry of the long, episodic essay Summer 80, Marguerite Duras asks: “And what is this concept of summer anyway?” A timely question for the arrival of a new collection of her writing—fond memories of summer with its heat and slowness and inactivity. Duras, on the other hand, comes across as a hyperactive, if not always systematic, writer throughout Me & Other Writing, a volume of her selected nonfiction works just out with the publishing project...

A dream. It’s a foggy afternoon. I am in a forest, playing a ball game with my granddad. I am three or four years old. My mom has gone somewhere and I don’t know where she is. I feel abandoned and scared. I don’t want to play the game. I can barely see through the fog anyway, so I cannot catch the ball when my granddad passes it to me. Then everything disappears and I am all alone in the forest. I don’t remember much else, I have no idea how much time has passed;...

Ours is an age when criticism often celebrates fat-free sentences, restrained ironies, and hope that’s caged in self-awareness—novels that walk before us like sunken-cheeked, unsmiling catwalk models. Huzama Habayeb’s Velvet, by contrast, is unafraid of its fullness: its gold jewelry, its fleshy abundance, its black velvet, and most of all, its melancholic and romantic lyrics, as sung by legendary Lebanese diva Fairouz. Velvet is a novel crammed with love and loss as it...

Welcome to America is a sad lament, a tale of a family in private crisis told by an eleven-year-old girl who has decided to stop talking. Reluctance to interact with other people seems to run in the family: her brother nails his bedroom door shut and urinates into bottles so that he can be undisturbed in his room, alone with his music. Their father is dead, as we soon discover, but mourning is only part of the reason for the children’s behavior. We gradually piece together a...

Wang Anyi’s novel Fu Ping is a coming-of-age tale set in the midst of the turbulent years of China’s Cultural Revolution. Its narrative arc—that of a young girl who learns to challenge convention and follow her heart—may not be wholly original, but its presentation, full of detours and side stories, makes for a memorable, smart study of the lives of ordinary people in Shanghai in the 1960s, during the second decade of Communist rule in China. Wang’s frequent...

It is 2019 and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s  Harbart reappears in a fresh English translation by Sunandini Banerjee. Since its initial publication, the novel has repeatedly returned in English like the future that is imagined by the book’s own ending. The afterlife of this spectral and political novel maintains its uncanniness. This is the third translation of the book into English (after Jyoti Panjwani’s in Sahitya Akademi’s 2004 edition and Arunava...

Reverend Pearson and his teenage daughter, Leni, travel the forgotten towns of rural Argentina spreading the good word. When their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, they are towed to the closest mechanic shop, run by Gringo Brauer with the help of his assistant, Tapioca. The repair is expected to take some time, so the father and daughter seek shade from the sweltering heat among the landscape of mangled cars. Tapioca and Leni are both sixteen years old and although they never...

Lisbon Tales is part of a long-running series of anthologies published by Oxford University Press seeking to collect some of the best writing set in or inspired by notable cities around the world and present it to an Anglophone audience. The addition of the Portuguese capital to this editorial project is a timely one as the city becomes an increasingly popular destination for foreign visitors.  The selection of stories in this volume indicates a wish to represent a variety of...

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape . . . —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”   Calendars add a particular cruelty to grief. The annual recurrence of a month crossing paths with a number can make the wounds of loss feel present again. Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner Guest, translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by Transit Books, is full of such moments of remembrance. The past—personal and collective—haunts...

The purge has been systematic and unrelenting. In the past few years, as Turkey’s strongman Recep Erdogan has consolidated his power following a failed coup attempt in 2016, thousands of dissenting politicians, activists, intellectuals and university professors have either been imprisoned or forced into exile. Newspapers, literary magazines and other forums of expression and public debate have faced censorship and scrutiny, with many editors harassed for content that does not toe the...

To spend time with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Keeping/ the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions is to enter into a flux of time that is both the past and future of American letters. The 372-page, large format book, recently published by Wave Books, is a tribute, a compendium, and also a repository of illuminating insights for writers and translators concerned with the questions that Rosmarie and Keith have been struggling with since the beginning of...

Five-year-old Kampol Changsamran patiently waits in his village for the return of his father, Wasu. “I’ll be back in a bit,” Wasu had promised hours earlier, and Kampol believed him, yet by nightfall the boy is still alone. Concerned neighbors, well aware that Kampol’s mother also recently abandoned the family, take him in for the night. So begins Duanwad Pimwana’s poignant Bright, originally published in 2003 and now translated into English by Mui...

When Ken Liu edited and translated his first anthology of Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets, in 2016, it was the year after Liu Cixin had exploded onto the global scene as the first Chinese national to win the Hugo Award (for The Three Body Problem, which Liu also translated). Hordes of new Anglophone fans were minted overnight, Barack Obama among them. Naturally, they asked for more.  Two and a half years later, Liu is finally answering those...

“You have to push a dying person into talking about love,” declares the narrator of Biljana Jovanović’s Dogs and Others (Psi i ostali), recently released by Istros Books in John K. Cox’s dynamic translation. The narrator, Lidia, lives with her mentally ill brother and their elderly, infirm grandmother. Written in a highly experimental style, the book follows Lidia’s coming of age in 1970s Belgrade in something between stream of...

Lina Wolff’s novel The Polyglot Lovers, translated by Saskia Vogel, is a warning to those who write by hand, and to those who write villains. The book won the 2016 August Prize, one of Sweden's main literary accolades, and received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN. Its plot hinges around a manuscript by Max Lamas, an aging novelist and old-school literary sexist who believes he’s written the perfect multilingual book. Unfortunately, his sole manuscript...

Since the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri finished his Divina Commedia, in 1320, more than one hundred different translations of his work have been published in English, over a dozen in this decade alone. The selection currently available caters to various tastes and purposes. Allen Mandelbaum’s blank-verse effort, studied in thousands of classrooms and universities around the world, remains the canonical go-to and has been recognized as such by Italy’s literary...

One tends to forget, particularly in the United States where fluency in foreign languages runs low, that Surrealism began and had it widest influence as a literary movement. Poetry, reviews, short stories, essays, novels and various forms of experimental writing were at the core of its revolutionary practice and the radical notions they promoted were embedded in the very form these texts took on. Mary Ann Caws, distinguished scholar and beloved doyenne of all things surrealist, has edited a...

In the title story of Yu Hua’s The April 3rd Incident: Stories, the narrator hears his family and friends whispering about something that will happen on April 3rd. There is no reason to suspect that this event is any more nefarious than a birthday party, but the narrator immediately starts entertaining ominous thoughts about the conversation he has overheard. The sense of a plot against him becomes so intense that he ends up leaving his hometown on a train. His destination is not...

When Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, invited Dubravka Ugresic to serve as a guest lecturer in the fall of 1991, the timing was fortuitous, to say the least. Ugresic’s homeland, Croatia, was caught up at that time in a virulent nationalist movement that demanded independence from the crumbling Yugoslav Socialist Republic and was part of a surge of separatist insurgencies which would soon lead the whole region into open conflict. In the following years, the Yugoslav wars...