The Hill Elementary staircase / Courtesy of Li Juan Translator’s note: Li Juan is a well-known and prolific essayist and poet in China, born in 1979 in Xinjiang. Writing in the …

Kedarnath Singh / Courtesy of Kalpna Singh-Chitnis Editor’s note: Three of Kedarnath Singh’s poems, translated into English by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, appeared on the WLT blo…

Photos by Lucia Duero “Postcards from the Border” contemplates the southern Mexico–Guatemala border, where the biggest detention center in Latin America is located. The author ma…

Photo: Pixabay For much of my undergraduate career, I have been torn between two fields. I was a journalism student incurably drawn to literature. I wanted to tell stories that mattered, but I wanted…

Sarah Maguire / Courtesy of Bloodaxe Books True translators take to their craft so intensely that they tend to hurtle toward invisibility, and in Britain, the land of the Anonymous Translator, nobody…

Portrait of Buchi Emecheta by Val Wilmer from the cover of The Slave Girl (G. Braziller, 1977) Buchi Emecheta’s novella The Bride Price should play a larger role in world litera…

In this love letter to public libraries, Linda Stack-Nelson concludes that libraries aren’t always about the books—and that’s what makes them indisposable. I will absolutely be the…

Participants from Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, and the United States participate in a panel discussion on 'queerness' at Casa de las Américas' Casa Tomada.  Mere days after Irma, one of 201…

Photo by DeusXFlorida / Flickr Thanks to the marketplace and the “culture of consensus,” writes 2016 Neustadt Prize laureate Dubravka Ugrešić, “art has become our favorite theme park.”…

Clifden Bookshop, Galway / Photo by janmennens While Ireland’s increasingly multicultural population has finally led to a greater representation of diversity in Irish fiction, this essay…

Left: Dickens reading to his daughters. Right: The Pickwick Papers According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Age…

Fatou Diome / Courtesy of frenchculture.org Fatou Diome, a Senegalese migrant to France, turns her hand to nonfiction in her 2017 pre-election polemic, Marianne porte plainte! Identité nationale:…

David Grossman / Photo courtesy of the Israeli-American Council Politics, literature, and biography converge in David Grossman’s work, as self-mutilating clown Dovaleh G. brings the author and hi…

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce invites us to “come into the pictures” (243.1). I’ve decided to play with his words by annotating / illustrating / disrupting the 628 pages of the book, a six-y…

Wally Gobetz, “Unisphere,” Corona Park, Flushing Meadows, New York, June 4, 2006 The following is a transcription of the author’s TEDxCoMo talk given on May 31, 2017. My ac…

Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, just released in a new translation, is a deeply meaningful and spiritual work, delightfully packed with lively banter, pathos, clever hyperbole, cheek…

Roberto Giannotti, “Island within an Island,” August 28, 2012 In early 2014, Maylis de Kerangal wrote a short text entitled À ce stade de la nuit [At this point of the night] at the invitati…

Anna Frajlich-Zając / Courtesy of Culture.pl The year 2016 was one of homecoming for famed Polish American poet Anna Frajlich. Recently retired from her position as senior lecturer of Polish language…

Judit Urquijo Pagazaurtundua, “Estación de buses,” Sri Lanka, September 2011 After spending time in Sri Lanka and traveling easily in a country that was fractured until only a few years…

Senior Airman Deng Deng, Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, September 2009. As one of the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan, Deng was allowed to immigrate to the United States and participate…

In Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, first published in Chinese in 2009 and translated into English in 2011, a novel depicting a dystopian contemporary China, people collectively forget import…

Was Lou Andreas-Salomé a writer or a muse, a feminist or a femme fatale? A new film by Cordula Kablitz-Post looks at one of Europe’s most influential intellectuals—and at her complicated life.…

Walter A. Aue, “Geraniums,” 2011 “He’s growing on me,” a friend commented a few days after I sent her a small selection of Yevgeny Kropivnitsky’s poems. Considering the derivation of the poet’s surna…

Géza Röhrig in Son of Saul Nominated for a 2016 Best Foreign Language Oscar, Hungary’s Son of Saul has been called “the film to beat.” Here in her review essay…

Stone faces in Cambodia. Photo by Tammy Ho. In the second installment of “Asian Traumatic Poetics” (to read part 1, click here), I will look at two more poems published in Cha that discuss a…