;
Every story had a face, a first and last name, a mother or son, brother or sister, losses and days of triumph.– Leonora Flis, “Zeroes”
The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by…
Daniel Simon
Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire. Anne Carson Float Random House I fo…
In the spring 1992 issue of World Literature Today, published to mark the quincentenary of Cristoforo Colombo’s encounter with the New World, Robert Berner writes: “The fact of the matter is…
Kim Stafford The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems Little Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the ge…-
How could utopia fail? – Elizabeth Fifer, “Dead Reckoning” In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collapsed a…
January 31, 2017For 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, 2016An 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…
-
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…
-
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…
July 6, 2015Last 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 a…-
“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,…
April 21, 2015Zack 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…
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 a…-
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…
- [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…
