Photo by Christopher Michel / FlickrFeng Jicai looks into the life of Parisians and their unique “street kiss” culture. He is mesmerized by the affection that they share unapologetically, in a wor…

A writer considers home as she remembers her partner of fifty-one years. I was born in Vienna and grew up in Australia. We didn’t speak German at home. My parents were “new” Australians for w…

Illustration by Marla Johnson“When Dogs Could Talk” appeared in WLT’s landmark 2007 issue devoted to endangered languages, guest-edited by Sydneyann Binion and David Shook, who were lingu…

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia / Photo by G. S. Matthews / FlickrReflecting on a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia and on the Dirty War in Argentina, her…

Photo by Alexander Grey / UnsplashIn this follow-up piece connected to her “The Keepers of the Books” essay in WLT’s May 2023 cover feature, Alice-Catherine Carls examines the role of rea…

Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan.What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of an imm…

Photo by Daniel Bernard / UnsplashA translator discovers that an author—whom she has translated and admired for so long—was complicit in a past administration’s efforts to silence dissenting write…

Photo by Javardh / UnsplashCarlos Labbé wonders whether it is “still possible to speak of experimental writing when we live in a reality where facts are constantly written in a language already pr…

Photo by JR P / FlickrIn her new essay collection, These Particular Women (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023), Kat Meads writes about famous twentieth-century women, mostly authors. In this sh…

Photo by Bekky Bekks / UnsplashHoping to see more peace and empathy in the world, a high school teacher in San Francisco creates a Peace Club where, in yielding control of an event to a sixteen-ye…

Scene from Performance Survivor’s Syndrome, based on a work by Andriy Bondarenko, Harmyder Theater (Lutsk, Ukraine), directed by Ruslana Porytska (@ruslana.porytska), starring Vadym Khainskyi (@vadym…

Photo by NASA / Unsplash “All our AI Frankenstein stories,” the author writes, “warn us that AI will destroy us, but far louder than that, they promise that the future is going to be mind-blowing…

Kishore giving his acceptance speech for the Cesare De Michelis Prize in Venice, May 25, 2022 / Photo copyright © by Stefano Marchiante Naveen Kishore, publisher of Seagull Books, became the firs…

Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language and culture have been repressed and russified for over two centuries by both tsarist Russia and the USSR. Michael M. Naydan looks at the evidence for Russia’…

Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop entertainme…

Reflecting on the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, Andrew Martino asks, “What does the attack on Rushdie tell us about ourselves, about our relationship to literature and writers?” Like most…

A writer uses a step-by-step guide as a mode of recounting her past pains as an American Orthodox priest’s wife, then comes full circle to the present as she grapples with her powerlessness yet a…

Photo by Alfons Morales / Unsplash In the following tribute, the author offers a reading of Pitol’s masterwork, El arte de la fuga. “Escape—flight—fugue,” he writes; “the polyphony of th…

A Ukrainian American scholar in Philadelphia contemplates Americans’ waning interest in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukrainian, her first language, “diasporic words, words that resonate with r…

Three cards from Courtney Alexander’s tarot deck, the Three of Blades, Young Coin (the collage includes the eyes of Misty Copeland), and the Ace of Staffs. How do images shape us culturally and a…

Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay. Born in 1956, Jean-Ba…

Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr Berlin poet, essayist, and playwright Esther Dischereit responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the shelling near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi Germany’s 19…

“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies,” Roberto Bolaño, who enjoyed accruing enemies in the pantheon of Latin American letters, writes in the short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (…

Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today. In Pavlo Tychyna…

Photo by Miko Guziuk / Unsplash In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan Stavans,…