Photo of Edel Rodriguez by Mecky CreusIn Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey (Metropolitan, 2023), acclaimed artist Edel Rodriguez illustrates a story of displacement, longing, and artistic aw…
COVER FEATURE
Writing the Polycrisis: Dispatches from a Calamitous Planet
It is not easy to open one’s heart to the crises of the world, and to observe, gauge, and feel the impact. In The Defense of Poesy (1580), the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney pointed out that the a…
Photo by Hugo Gomes/Wirestock Creators / Stock.adobe.comIt’s 2050, and five African nations have surrendered their sovereignty to form a new nation. To some, it was unfathomable that the rulers of c…
Photos by NASA Johnson / Flickr.comMarking the Wetlands by Valeria Mussiotranslated by Whitney DeVos & Valeria Meiller “If all this is a bay, why can’t I see it?”…
Photo by driftwood / Stock.adobe.comThe offspring’s appetites know no end. What’s a mother, any mother—even that mother who nurtures us all—to do? The wound is smaller than last time, tiny teeth mark…
Dead Horse Bay, 2015 | Photos by Santiago Acosta1. One morning I left home and took the Q35 down to Brooklyn. On the phone, the blue path showed me the way to Barren Island, a man-made peninsula that…
Photo of Lebanon by Patricia Abdallah / Unsplash.com“Through a sort of grating irony,” writes Charif Majdalani, Lebanon “remains a sort of model but in the negative sense of the term, because it conce…
Photos from the aftermath of the McDougall Creek wildfire of August 2023 by Andreas RutkauskasAfter the wildfires, 2023 Grief sits in the bottom of my lungs — maybe I cradle it there so I can breathe…
Photo by Ella Ivanescu / Unsplash.comClimate change, resource depletion, extreme weapons, AI, and more: Richard Heinberg looks at the individual threats composing the unprecedented convergence of risk…
March 2024
With a cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez, “Writing the Polycrisis” headlines the March/April 2024 issue of World Literature Today, showcasing contributions by nine writers, mainly from the Global South. Additional highlights include interviews, creative nonfiction, booklists, essays, and more! Plus a book review section brimming with the latest must-reads also enliven the issue, making it your latest passport to the best new reading from around the world.