Here’s the key, take it. Read these words and travel back in time. This is what Polish writer and editor Małgorzata Szejnert has decided to offer her readers in Ellis Island: A People’s History: a miniature travel machine. Szjenert is a magician of the eye and of memory. From the opening page she leads the reader to the bank of an infinite river and points upstream, to the sources of the past: this patch of land, now called Ellis Island, is where the Lenni Lenape Indians...

David Diop’s new novel, At Night All Blood is Black (tr. Anna Moschovakis), combines a war story with allegory and myth. In under 150 pages, the book engages biblical tropes as it takes readers to the bloody trenches of World War I through the troubled account of a Senegalese soldier fighting in the French army. The result is a warning against war and its savage consequences. The book delves into the brutal details of WWI and colonial domination, invoking canonical texts against a...

This new anthology of Vietnamese short stories, published by Columbia University Press, unites twenty diverse voices from contemporary Vietnamese literature on the topic of the American military action in the country. While the war officially ended in 1975, Other Moons' narratives demonstrate its enduring consequences in Vietnamese life and thinking. Published in English translation for the first time, these works offer a fresh perspective on the conflict that took place between...

In the early 1980s, Mexico was bailed out of a foreign debt crisis by the IMF and the World Bank so that it could continue paying back interest on loans from US banks. The condition for this financial relief was a set of sweeping structural adjustments which, under the banner of neoliberalism, created the perfect storm of conditions that, in the decades to come, would facilitate the rise of the modern Mexican cartels, and consequently, the border crisis with the US. In Grieving: Dispatches...

Alain Mabanckou’s new novel begins on a Saturday and ends the following Monday, a compressed timeline that suggests a story of limited scope. Told from the perspective of an adolescent boy who hopes to track down a missing family pet, this book brims with the kind of private longings and granular observations that are often associated with small, intimate works of fiction. And yet, in under 250 pages, Mabanckou imbues his narrative with the qualities of a minor epic, placing his young...

These days, there could be fierce competition over who could write the book on “how to be a fascist”—if we could agree on what a fascist is. Michela Murgia’s lapidary definition, depicted in a Forrest Gump caricature on the cover of the original Italian edition, is “fascist is as fascist does.” While historians have found fascism notoriously difficult to define, and there exist numerous volumes analyzing its historical roots, the myriad forms of its...

They still sing to us, the ancient poets do. Despite our ever-increasing distance from those first songs, the music remains; it can still be heard, if one is properly attuned for its reception. Part of the ongoing persistence of the classical tradition has to do with each generation’s need for their own version of that music. For every age that coalesces into a clearly defined aesthetic ideology—whether it’s labeled Romantic, Modernist or Postmodernist—we receive an...

This is the third installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem, or have a look at the previous installments in the series: Meyer's review of Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero, and Kareem's review of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. The...

Marcos Tejo, the protagonist of Agustina Bazterrica’s taut and thought-provoking second novel, is tormented by horrifying dreams. In one, he watches helplessly as a wolf consumes his son. In another, he stands amid tree limbs strewn with “eyes, hands, human ears, and babies.” Daybreak, alas, brings him no relief. For Marcos, reality is every bit as disturbing as his nightmares. Tender Is the Flesh was first published in Spanish in 2017, earning its Argentinian author the...

It is not every season that two new translations of a major work of Western literature appear simultaneously, yet that is precisely what has occurred with the 2020 summer catalog and the publication of fresh English-language versions of the Portuguese-language original of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908). Machado was the founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and, more importantly, is widely...

This is the second installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem, or have a look at the first installment in the series, Meyer's review of Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero. When discussing her latest novel, Minor Detail, Palestinian author...

An angry lone shooter wanders through the mist into town, bullets clinking. A woman sits bolt upright in the back of a taxi going the wrong way on an unlit road. A detective stumbles through the woods, dodging the searchlights of night poachers. In Ha Seong-nan’s new short story collection, Bluebeard’s First Wife, darkness and fog turn farmers’ fields and city suburbs into places of hidden horrors. These eleven stories use shock and horror to dissect contemporary...

Reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs under lockdown is a particularly strange (and estranging) experience, since so much of the novel is concerned with a heightened awareness of the decaying female body, loneliness, and the passage of time. Looking up from a page to re-immerse yourself in real time, then engaging again with the particular texture of Kawakami’s prose, her descriptions of suburban Tokyo and Osaka in which years unspool within the space of a few pages, is a...

Two men set off across Japan in search of the perfect spot to commit suicide. It’s not your traditional travel story, let alone an ideal vacation, but Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands offers an encounter between Eastern and Western literary traditions that makes for a ghostly, unsettling trip. Poschmann is a well-known figure in Germany, a respected writer whose work spans different genres (poems, short stories, essays, novels) and has been distinguished with accolades such...

Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation is a new series of reviews from Words Without Borders that seeks to provide one possible response to the habitual question, "How Should We Review Translation?" The question is trickier than it might seem on its face, for it assumes that reviewers are paying any attention to the translator at all. In recent years, progress has been made in creating greater visibility for the art of translation through campaigns like #namethetranslator; still,...

This is the first installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem. The Ecuadorean writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero is not a fan of the family. In each of the thirteen stories that make up her collection Cockfight, newly translated by Frances Riddle, Ampuero...

Kosef J is an inmate at an unnamed Romanian prison, where he serves his sentence for an undisclosed crime. One day, after failing to give him breakfast, and later to drag him to the fields to work with the rest of the prisoners, a guard casually mentions that as of that morning, Kosef J is free. Yet the wary inmate knows nothing of the world beyond the high prison walls, having spent the better part of his adult life behind bars. Instead of marching out the front gate, Mr. K claims he...

When it was originally released in Spanish in 2017, Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season) quickly became the Mexican novel of the year. Critics praised the book’s forceful prose and compelling narrative, noting how Melchor masterfully taps into disparate literary traditions—among them, noir detective novels and modernist psychological prose—to create something very much her own. Prior to the release of the novel, Melchor was already considered...

They led you away at dawn. So begins the section of Anna Akhmatova’s iconic poem “Requiem,” which Monika Zgustova chose as the frontispiece for this immensely powerful book about women’s experiences in the Soviet gulag. Zgustova was a teenager in the mid-1970s, when her family fled Czechoslovakia to escape political persecution from the Communist regime (her father was a prominent Czech linguist). She grew up in the US. Intensely interested in Russian literature,...

Often associated with dramatic images of war and daunting journeys undertaken amid precarious circumstances, the experience of contemporary migration and asylum-seeking gains an unexpected Beckettian tone in Two Blankets, Three Sheets, an engrossing and exasperating novel by the Iraq-born Dutch novelist Rodaan Al Galidi. The first of Al Galidi’s works to be translated into English, the book straddles the line between fiction and memoir as it draws on the author’s own experience...