Chris Beckett, One & Other, by Antony Gormley, Trafalgar Square, London, 2009. In this post and one that will follow next week, I will explore the representation of personal trauma in po…

Gisela Heffes After translating Ischia (2000), the novel by Argentine writer Gisela Heffes, I sat down with her to discuss how the novel—about a young female narrator on a journ…

A girl waves the Egyptian national flag as thousands of demonstrators participate in antigovernment protests, February 8, 2011. Photo: Felipe Trueba / EPA / Thinking Images v.9 afterwar…

The following essay is adapted from Quixote: The Novel and the World, due out from W.W. Norton next week. Asteroid 3552 displays some bizarre, disassociated behavior. Astronomers des…

The author’s three-foot stack ofIndian books. Photo © Doug Wolf.  I’m reading nonwhite this year. That’s what many readers/writers around the world are proclaiming. What they mean is that they’re foc…

Australian artist Peter Gould’s “Iqra Bookshelf” (2011). The word Iqra’ (“Read”) is deeply symbolic to Muslims, as it was the first word of revelation given to the Prophet Muha…

Since Horace’s original, many poets have written their version of an Ars Poetica. The best known is Archibald MacLeish’s. Can MacLeish’s poem cast light on the art of a different literary genre,…

View of Stockholm, Sweden, from the Södermalm district. Photo by J. A. Alcaide. In a corner of Stockholm, the Argentinean father of someone who was once, briefly, my lover, stumbles against the grey…

Kim Myung Won An impressive poet and experimental author in her own right, EJ Koh reflects on the many sources needed in order to translate Kim Myung Won’s poetry into English:…

Hartwig HKD, “Black Icarus,” 2010. Old photographs and their conventions are both familiar and foreign to us, with their alienated and uncanny appeal. They also often seem very formal and stiff compa…

Harbhajan Singh Hundal was born in Lyallpur (Pakistan) in 1934. In addition to fifteen books of poetry, he has written travelogues and autobiographical accounts. He is also an avid literary transl…

Anthropologists and linguists no doubt are having a field day trying to chronicle and dissect how, in the early autumn of 2012, “Gangnam Style” became an American idiomatic expression. It stands for…

Tibetan poet Woeser  Since China’s invasion in the 1950s, the West’s main focus has been on the struggle for independence in Tibet, reporting the monks’ fiery suicides and protestors or journalists d…

When it was announced yesterday that Mo Yan is this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it echoed the case made by WLT executive director Robert Con Davis-Undiano, who deliver…