A series of apocalyptic earthquakes and aftershocks rock Tehran. Some residents attempt to flee, yet traffic snarls the roadways. Fights erupt. Cell service blinks out. In the midst of the growing bedlam strides Shadi, twenty something, questioning life, low on opium and looking to score. So begins Mahsa Mohebali’s exhilarating In Case of Emergency, a novel originally published in Iran in 2008 (as  نگران...

One gets the uneasy feeling that 59-year-old Shukri Mabkhout has been holding himself back. It might be an automatic reflex, after decades of living under tyranny in Tunisia. He is currently the director of Manouba University — where he teaches Arabic, literature, and discourse analysis — and has produced many fine works of literary criticism. Mabkhout comes off as restrained in interviews. This benign demeanor is at odds with the raging passion and rebelliousness that...

If Rima, the narrator of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, could have her way, she would not be writing her story—she would be drawing it. “Before,” she writes, referring to her life in Syria prior to its ongoing civil war, “I used to believe that drawing was more capable of expression than words.” But Rima has been relegated to an underground cellar that is her de facto trap and perhaps her salvation, a cellar that is by chance supplied with...

In the introduction to their translation of Antonio Gamoneda’s Castilian Blues [Blues Castellano], Benito del Pliego and Andrés Fisher describe the book as “rooted in an ‘aesthetics of translation.’” It is a resonant phrase that sums up both their approach to translating Gamoneda’s poetry and the confluence of sources that feed into his adoption of a universalized blues-idiom. Written during the years 1961–1966 but first published...

In Helene Bukowski’s Milk Teeth, a debut novel of stark images, “scorched” birds plummet from the sky and plants are “bleached by the sun.” Forests are eerily still after “the great death of the animals,” when desperate quadrupeds sought safety in ocean waters, their carcasses washing ashore “among the pieces of driftwood and plastic.” Bukowski published Milk Teeth in her native Germany in 2019, the year she turned 26, and as we see in...

In the late 1940s, with World War II over, tensions were mounting in the French colony of Algeria. It is during this period that Mokhtar Mokhtefi gains admission to a prestigious French boarding school, Duveyrier, in Blida, Algeria, not far from his home. From the classrooms of this school, he learns about the philosophical and political principles that underpin French governance: liberté, égalité, fraternité. During his weekends at home among his family and...

The publication of Mario Levrero’s (1940-2004) The Luminous Novel in English, in Annie McDermott’s beautiful translation, is a true literary event. Although Levrero has enjoyed cult status for some time in Uruguay and Argentina, his work is just beginning to get the recognition it deserves elsewhere. Published posthumously in 2005, The Luminous Novel is his masterpiece: an almost unclassifiable work, halfway between fiction and autobiography, in which we follow the author...

Magda Cârneci’s FEM was first published in Romanian a decade ago (Cartea Românească, 2011) and reissued by Polirom in its popular “Top 10+” series in 2014. The novel was nominated for the annual award of the Romanian Writers’ Union, the Augustin Frăţilă Award, and for prestigious awards given by Radio România Cultural and the cultural weekly Observator cultural. Its first foreign translation, by Florica Courriol, was published in...

Last Summer in the City, a novel first published in 1973 by Gianfranco Calligarich and translated from the Italian for the first time by Howard Curtis, is a meditation on a certain kind of life that perhaps can only be lived in a city like Rome, as Calligarich writes, a city that is “not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that’s what...

It may be cliché to say that a book transports you to another world, but in a period hemmed in by lockdowns and travel restrictions, Marina Jarre’s memoir Distant Fathers (I padri lontani) stands out, among other reasons, simply for covering so much geographical, linguistic, and temporal ground. Jarre was born in Latvia in 1925 to an Italian mother and a Latvian Jewish father. After her parents’ divorce in 1935, she and her younger sister Sisi were sent to live with...

Decades after being exiled by the colonial forces occupying her homeland, a woman returns to Palestine to repair her childhood home––and to confront a past filled with heartbreak and bloodshed. Her name is Nidal and, now in old age, she has spent her life running from the memories of the armed confrontations that roiled the region during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Many of Nidal’s memories have to do with Rabie, a boy she fell in love with at the start of the armed...

Jorgenrique Adoum turned his own name into “postspanish.” Melding the “e” of Jorge to the “e” of Enrique and vice versa, he transformed his own signature into a banner of sorts, an embodiment of his politically charged rebellion against linguistic conventions. The Ecuadorian poet, who has been hailed by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda as “the best Latin American poet of his generation,” has finally made his book-length debut in...

Russian feminist poetry arrived in English with three seminal publications in 2020/21: the much-debated bilingual anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (Isolarii, ed. Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse), featuring twelve poets, including Lida Yusupova; Rymbu’s Life in Space (Ugly Duckling Presse); and now Yusupova’s The Scar we Know, which includes sizable excerpts from three of her Russian collections. And it is Yusupova—hailing from Leningrad...

Kjell Askildsen, winner of the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize in 2009, is a consummate chronicler of contradictory, quicksilver emotions and impulses. There is in his work a careful calibration of his characters' inner lives, of small dramas in no way empty of incident, whose ultimate crux is the desultory, dangerous weight of time: time is too slow, nothing ever changes, time doesn’t matter, then it is too abrupt, it’s unbearably long—all in prose that is as...

Do Palestinian authors speak for their people, or for themselves? Should they write about politics, and if so, how? These dilemmas face many “resistance poets,” but especially Najwan Darwish, who burst onto the world stage in 2000 with his first collection, Kaan yaduqq al-baab al-akhiir (He Knocked the Final Door), and who had his English debut with a volume of selected poems in translation, Nothing More to Lose (NYRB Poets, 2014). Since then, he has been translated into ten...

One of the great joys of oral storytelling is the intimacy often forged between a talented speaker and an audience, which can transform any room into a two-person confessional, a late-night phone call, or a conversation with the stranger at the nearest barstool. I’ve been thinking about this kind of intimacy while reading and rereading Wild Swims, the latest story collection by Danish author Dorthe Nors, translated confidently by Misha Hoekstra. Shortlisted for the International Man...

Ae-ran Kim’s debut novel, My Brilliant Life, elegantly translated by Chi-Young Kim, is narrated by a witty teenager with a rare disorder. Areum, as he’s called, suffers from progeria, a degenerative disease that causes accelerated aging from age two. At sixteen, he has the organs of an old man and is in precipitous physical decline. Despite his prognosis, Areum tells his story with wry humor, showing great curiosity about himself as well as the people around him, starting with...

Maël Renouard begins Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet with a memory about memory itself: One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own. What follows is essentially an in-depth exploration of that flash...

The unnamed narrator of “Paris Périphérie,” a wisp of a story in Elvira Navarro’s new collection of short fiction, Rabbit Island, has an innate sense of direction. Even in an unfamiliar neighborhood in the bustling capital city of a foreign country, a hunch usually points her in the desired direction. As we meet her, she’s deeply conflicted about an important relationship, and long walks seem to clarify her thoughts.  One day, while searching for a...

Last year, I was asked by an American editor to submit a selection of my poems for an anthology of contemporary Arabic poetry. “Self-translations are not allowed,” came her disclaimer, predicated on the assumption that a poet is effectively monolingual, and reinforcing a modern understanding of translation, and by extension other cultural practices, to be neutral and objective. “We think self-translation poses a threat to the art of translation,” she added. As I come...