February 28, 2023
January 24, 2023
Daniel Simon
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January 31, 2017 |
For the past decade, World Literature Today has been proud to collaborate with Beijing Normal University to bring out an annual Chinese edition of the magazine as well as a biannual journal... -
Language written in the aftermath of extremity [arises] not from recollection in tranquility but from wanderings in a debris field. – Carolyn Forché, “An Inexhaustible Responsibility... -
In a country as big as America it is as impossible to prophesy as it is to generalize, without being tripped up, but it seems to me that there is room for hope as well as mistrust. The epic loses... -
April 27, 2016 |
An in-class haiku translation project (2013) / Photo courtesy of Kimiko Hahn Recently, the Poetry Society of America announced award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn as its newly elected presid... -
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.... -
Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015 In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zap... -
. . . we sleep in the tents of the prophets . . . sing so that distance may forget us. . . . Ours is a country of words. – Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like All People,” trans. Fady Joudah, in... -
To celebrate World Literature Today’s ninetieth year of continuous publication, I’m pleased to announce the 2016 Puterbaugh Essay Series, a yearlong suite of review-essays that survey the tw...
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Some days light is the color of all / my losses.—Lauren Camp, “Alma’s Stripes” Do poems have dimensions? We know they occupy space on the page, but can we measure verse the way we measure con...
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I noticed he was wearing white summer gloves and knew at once it was for poetry’s stigmata.—Zsuzsa Takács, “Masters Whose Doorsteps” Psalm 51, known to many by its opening lines in...
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July 6, 2015 |
Last week, we said farväl to our beloved book review editor, Marla Johnson, who retired after working at World Literature Today since 1992. For more than twenty years, Marla worked (... -
Alene Puterbaugh. Painting by Ed Kelley. In March 1972, in response to a letter from University of Oklahoma president Paul F. Sharp addressed to her late husband, Alene Puterbaugh wrote: “I wish to... -
“In the United States . . . there is the obscure, slow effort of an entire nation to seize universal history and assimilate it as its patrimony.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Americans and Their Myths,...
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April 21, 2015 |
Zack Rogow and students from the Norman Public Schools | Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art | April 2, 2015. Photos: Daniel Simon In a recent essay for WLT, Hungarian writer Zsolt Láng muses on wri... -
In a recent op-ed for Mother Jones, Ted Genoways laments the declining cultural influence of university-sponsored literary magazines, many of which have been faced with dwind...
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Graywolf Press, 2014 How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project... -
Literature and storytelling confirm us as relatives and neighbors in our infinite diversity. — Mia Couto, “Re-enchanting the World” In her nominating statement for the 2014 Neustadt Internat...
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[After 1989], I felt as though I had crawled out from under the debris of a mass collision of historical proportions, slightly scraped, yet a new man. – Durs Grünbein, “The Vocation... -
From our vantage point here on the Oklahoma plains, we’re constantly reminded that we live in “Native America” (every time we look at the license plate of a car in front of us), but few probably real... -
[Borges’s] Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel. – Anthony Kerrig...
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April 18, 2014 |
When news broke yesterday about the death of Gabriel García Márquez, the entire staff of World Literature Today paused to reflect on the legacy of a writer who not only redrew t... -
When I first met Maaza Mengiste in May 2012 at a French Roast café in Manhattan’s West Village, I was in New York to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. I had just gotten...
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While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the... -
It is as if the world broke off. Why did it break off? Because the myth ended. – Anne Carson, preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides For those who subsc...
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Five years on from the Great Recession, WLT is proud to present an international sampling of working-class literature, guest-edited by Jeanetta Calhoun...
