Bruno Montané Krebs.Photo by Esther Taboada
To complement “Mapping Life through Poetry,” his interview that appears in the November 2014 print edition of WLT, Ryan Long offers the follow…
ESSAYS
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 protest…
Photo by Jonathan Adami In our hyperdigital era, mass reading events provide opportunities for human interact…
Photo by Lotus Carroll/Flickr To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz Writing…
Illustration adapted from Nikki Pugh/Flickr With bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria’s Secret in Pride and Prejudi…
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 cosmopolitan outlo…- Photo by luipermom/Flickr Computational 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…
- In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legisl…
- American exceptionalism makes us believe we are extraordinary. Consequently, we trust our literature is outstanding as well. Truth is, we are as narrow as everyone else, and our literature showcas…
- By Peter Groth (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0],via Wikimedia Commons This essay is adapted from Leonardo Padura’s November 2012 speech in Havana, Cuba, at the Casa de las Améri…
- Having just spent a year in Berlin, novelist Claire Messud reports on her observations in and around the city. “In Berlin,” she writes, “a sense of becoming trumps a sense of bel…
- The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and…
- Photo by Pesis/FLIKR Under the sign of the bicycle, writers and riders share a special affinity. Alon Raab offers a global literary tour. Bicycles: because lo…
- "Science fiction works differentially from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. . . . It has its own particular ways of making sense out of langua…
- London is peppered with the grotesque. Is this a revival of a Dickensian past, Johnny Depp style, or are we creating a new carnivalesque? From pickled sharks to supermodel yoga, how close must you…
- Tezuka Osamu spent the first two decades of his career entertaining Japanese children with his manga like Tetsuwan Atomu, but the rigors of being Japan's most visible creative public icon…
- Editorial note: Robinson’s tribute below is a companion piece to his essay “Filling the Unforgiving Minute: The Literature of Running,” which appears in the March 2012 print edition of WL…
- In a ceremony on February 27, 2010, presided over by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the Coordinator of the Council On Communication and Citizenshi…
- The landscape of southern AlbaniaPhoto (c) 2006 by John K. Cox Since the end of communism and the revival of old customs and compulsions, ten thousand people have died from blood fe…
- Alexandros Vasmoulakis is one of many street artists whose artwork reflects the urban fabric of contemporary Greece. His shattered, floating figures cover many of the abandoned neoclassical buildings…
- Adrianne Kalfopoulou And then what you wanted was salt, . . . but you could not turn to look. —Cecilia Woloch, “Salt” My parents were deliberate about escaping their place of origin and…
- The waves of mass killing that swept across the old Mitteleuropa during the 1930s and ’40s are neither forgotten nor ignored by twenty-first-century writers. Four recent novels illustrate this con…
- For three days in November 2011, fifteen women writers gathered in Oaxaca City, Mexico, filling a colonial apartment next door to a church dedicated to the Virgin of Solitude. These woman are all—by…
- ¡Ay! diidxazá, diidxazá diidxa'rusibani naa, naa nanna zanítilu dxi guiniti gubidxa cá. Oh, Zapotec, dear Zapotec language that gives me life, I know you will not dieuntil the sun's demise.– Gabriel L…
- In the Ukrainian literary tradition there have been scores of women poets, several of them reaching extraordinarily prominent status. The most renowned of them include the legendary seventeenth-centur…