Linyao Ma interviews Basma Adel Aziz, an Egyptian author and psychiatrist, whose novels are considered representative of Arabic dystopian fiction, which has proliferated in the past decade.
“She waits for me in the rain at the corner of the gas chamber, / asking a young guide if she knows / where her uncle was killed in 1942,” from “Traduttore, traditore,” by Lidija Dimkovska (trans. by Ljubica Arsovska & Patricia Marsh-Stefanovska)
Karlos K. Hill interviews cover artist Fulton Leroy Washington for the first installment of a new feature for WLT, Bearing Witness.
“We won’t turn over the body / to the judge’s forensics, / nor to the cameras that can never have / their fill of the dead,” from “Ül of Catrileo,” by Jaime Huenún Villa (trans. Cynthia Steele)
“workers descend into the mines for / the sound of labor to reverberate through the depth / the inherent blindness of the processed ore / diminishes the compassion of the working hand,” from “elegy for bruised poetry,” by Cengiz Sinan Çelik (trans. by Öykü Tekten)
“Everything is racial for the gringos/ even making you feel guilty / for not knowing how to drive / just when they needed it the most,” from “Notes for a Paleface Museum,” by Enza García Arreaza
“It’s a lie that we can keep everything alive inside us through memories. Some things are lost for good. And there is, in recognizing that, a brave, icy beauty. Even if it pierces your heart and shatters it to pieces,” from “What is Lost,” by Leila Guerriero (trans. Frances Riddle)
Named after a medieval French bishop, a transgender poet and essayist reflects on the inheritances we’re born with and those we fashion for ourselves.
For the narrator of the following crónica, 16mm films made by Kaqchikel villagers, flying ants, and dragonflies all flicker in the historical shadows of a ruined amphitheater that, in the Guatemala of the 1970s, “ceased to exist.”
Niillas Holmberg’s collection Juolgevuođđu, co-translated by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Johanna Domokos, will be the first single-authored book by a Sámi poet published by a US press. Here, the translators reflect on how the book-as-drum “reverberates across its legal, linguistic, lyrical, philosophical, and scientific facets.”
Named after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood—Nigeria’s motion-picture industry—began on VHS tapes, literally gained altitude as in-flight offerings in the 1990s, and now has films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Nigerian poet and lawyer Tade Ipadeola traces this rise of the industry, along with its rising scrutiny.
“It’s hard to believe that just an hour’s car ride away they’re already threatening to ration water. The worst drought in decades, they say, every year,” from “Like Creeping Lava,” an essay by Catalina Infante Beovic
Renee H. Shea interviews Laura Larson, author of City of Incurable Women, a study of photographs of women diagnosed with hysteria taken at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a new and dynamic poetic voice from Poland. His newest collection, Crops, translated into English by Peter Constantine, was published by Rain Taxi in November 2021. In this interview, Constantine and Kwiatkowski discuss the themes of his poetry and his endeavors as a musician and activist.
Anderson Tepper interviews Nigerian writer Ben Okri, author of Astonishing the Gods and Every Leaf a Hallelujah. They speak about invisibility, consciousness, and the lifesaving powers of literature.
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