The following excerpt is from The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, by Fernando Morais, forthcoming Verso Books (on sale wherever books are sold on June 16, 2015). Roberto Fernández Retamar…
Essays
Photo by Yuri NumerovWriters from those parts of the world where democracy has for too long remained an unfulfilled dream cannot be apolitical. Over the years, as media freedom a…
Photo by Neil CraverAndrés Felipe Solano tackles fiction in his novels and facts in his journalism—as a writer, he alternates between the real and the imaginary. Of course, that…
Going to strange places only counts if you go to strange places in yourself. Actually hearing the environment anywhere means you are hearing the Arriver within. Everything is local once you arrive…
Photo by Francis Bijl/FlickrWorld culture today is developing amid expanding globalization, which means that national literatures appear to develop more and more similar features…
Serhiy Zhadan and Lyubko Deresh This past summer, two Ukrainian writers celebrated milestone birthdays, a decade after the Orange Revolution and amid new upheavals.…
The Berlin Wall. Photo by Rane AhbijeetFan club activities can be essential to the promotion of domestic science fiction in a foreign country. The science-fiction fan clubs of Berlin share a uniqu…
Photo by Susan Sermoneta/FlickrThe Swiss poet Kuno Raeber (1922–92) characterized his encounters with the cities Rome and New York as the “great erotic shocks” of his life. Rome quic…
Bruno Montané Krebs.Photo by Esther TaboadaTo complement “Mapping Life through Poetry,” his interview that appears in the November 2014 print edition of WLT, Ryan Long offers the fol…
The Berlin Wall. Photo by Joede SousaSince the fall of the Berlin wall, a rich literary culture has emerged that grapples not only with Germany’s past but also the multilayered e…
Photos by Ben PackhamBen Packham’s arresting photo gallery is a window to Mongolia’s lavish natural splendor, the sprawl of its growing capital city, Ulaanbaatar, and the icy beauty of the Mongoli…
Illustration by Joel FelixA cofounder of the NSK Prize looks back to the award’s inspired inception and finds, a decade later, a strong tradition of excellence …
It is hard for me to believe that this column has appeared in almost every issue of WLT for a decade, and I am gratified that it has been so well received. For that I thank WLT’…
The opening lines of Lea Goldberg’s poem “A god once commanded us,” from Found in Translation: Modern Hebrew Poets (2006), tr. Robert Friend, ed. Gabriel Levin.Israeli poetry of prot…
Illustration from Feng Yunpeng’s Jinshi suo 金石索 (1821; Index of inscription on bronzes and stones), as featured in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, translated and edited…
Photo by Jonathan AdamiIn our hyperdigital era, mass reading events provide opportunities for human interactio…
Photo by Lotus Carroll/FlickrTo read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz Writin…
A translator contemplates the challenges and rewards of translating the humor of American writer David Sedaris for a Greek audience.Some years ago…
Illustration adapted from Nikki Pugh/FlickrWith bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria’s Secret in Pride and Prejudice…
Written in the wake of the Barcelona Olympics, Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang reflects the tensions of a culture straining against its minor status with aspirations toward a cosmopol…
Photo by Fey Ilyas/FlickrThe immense space of the supersensible. . . is filled for us with dark night.— Immanuel Kant…
Evening TimeHa Jong-o On the subway at evening rush hourI called my wife to say I was on my way home.Hearing a familiar voice, I looked round,among the exhausted people on their way home,an…- Photo illustration by Mary WuestewaldThere are, as evidenced by the working-class literature special issue of World Literature Today, many working-class writers around the world. However, the…
- Photo by luipermom/FlickrComputational reading puts us in touch with an exploratory way of engaging with language, with how we use words and how we arrive at their meanings. It i…
- For guest editor George Henson, it’s been a long journey from reading The Front Runner in 1977 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, to writing about queer lit for World Literature Today. But ju…
