Mohammed Choukri’s book Faces has finally been published in an exquisite translation by Jonas Elbousty. Published by Georgetown University Press, this translation is a continuation of th…

Melissa Weininger’s Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023) is a thought-provoking and hopeful book. Written during the…

Photo of Poniatowska by Pedrobautista – Own work, CC BY 3.0 Las siete cabritas (2000), the literal translation of which would be “The Seven Little Female Goats,” is the original…

Published in 2023, The Age of Lonelinesses is Asaad Zohrabi’s debut novel. Born in 1978 in Ravansar, Kermanshah, Iran, Zohrabi has already released four volumes of poetry. His first…

A centennial celebration of poet Nissim Ezekiel compiled by his daughter, poet Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Nissim Ezekiel, Poet and Father (Pippa Rann Books, 2024) consists of a collection…

Photo by Laurin Rinder / Adobe Stock Abdilatif Abdallah (b. 1946, Mombasa) is a major Swahili poet who was, until recently, largely unknown to English readers. A beautiful volume of his work,…

Photo of Hon Lai Chu by Jeffy Lau In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines, 2025), intimacy becomes a matter of state policy. The Conjoinment Act, a fict…

Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite (2019), dir. Bong Joon Ho / Courtesy of IMDB If you have ever taken a writing class in Europe or North America (aka the West), you have likely heard abo…

Amanda Hess / Photo by Loreto Caceres / Wikipedia If you have not yet read the writing of Amanda Hess, you have been depriving yourself of the most insightful commentary on our times. Hess wri…

Photo by Ignacio Gallego / Flickr In the pantheon of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) stands out for his poetic renown as much as for the effigies and exiles of himself and his po…

Photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash Strange Pictures (HarperVia, 2025) is the first book released in English by the mysterious and cryptic best-selling Japanese author Uketsu. This…

Photo by Kit Leong / Adobe Stock Those who have not suffered trauma directly tend to think of it as an event. It is not. Trauma is an atmosphere; trauma terraforms, creates a new world in whic…

Like many other Ukrainian writers since 2022, Ostap Slyvynsky has answered a unique call of duty, one of cultural and lexicographical preservation. In his compilation A Ukrainian Dictionary o…

Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) was an author immersed in the Western literary tradition. His first readings were of classical authors and the Spanish Golden Age. When he finally decided to write, he f…

Background photo by Taiga / Adobe Stock / Author photo courtesy of AUC Press Years ago, I visited the Alhambra in Granada and was awestruck by the grand palace and fortress that was built during…

Ọlábísí Àjàlá on his scooter / Wikipedia Nigerian journalist Mashood Ọlábísí Àjàlá (1934–1999), whose name became synonymous with the word “traveler” due to his reputation for wanderlust, devotedl…

Edited by John Zheng, Conversations with Lenard D. Moore (University Press of Mississippi, 2024) collects sixteen interviews conducted over three decades by Lenard D. Moore’s (b. 1958) p…

In her semi-autobiographical novel The Camp: A Little Girl from Karabakh (Shuddhashar, 2022), Gunel Movlud refers to her life as an internally displaced person during the First Nagorno-Karaba…

Yassini Girls (Beacon Books, 2024), the new novel by Shereen Malherbe, invites readers into a rich and emotional narrative, weaving together the personal and the historical. Through the inter…

Five or six years ago, I was reading Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919–1990) with my Arabic teacher and thought of writing an article about him in English, but I found only one translation on Amazon. I was pu…

Caroline Cingria, C. F. Ramuz, pastel (1903) / Images courtesy of Noël Cordonier Lumen Obscurum Light and darkness are a major part of the global human experience; their contras…

Photo of the author by Jeff Norman / ZeinaAzzam.com In Zeina Azzam’s mesmerizing collection of poems Some Things Never Leave You (Tiger Bark Press, 2023), tenderness means gazing directly…

Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Fernando Vallejo’s The Abyss (New Directions, 2024) is reaching new audiences in Yvette Siegert’s updated English translation. Twenty-three years after it…

Gjekë Marinaj’s Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems, co-translated by the author and Frederick Turner (Syracuse University Press, 2023), marks the English debut of an Albanian-bor…

The first sentence of Janice Weizman’s The Wayward Moon (Toby Press, 2024) sets the stage with clarity and precision: “I, Rahel Bat Yair, was born in the city of Sura, which lies on the weste…